Installation: A

Features: A

East of Use: A

Product Support: A

Installation Rating: A This unit is a network device that requires the support of the individual in your school who has ‘admin’ privileges to your network for installation. Installation was really very simple and straightforward.

The truly excellent manual walks the user through the installation process, which is different depending upon the network protocol that your site uses. We simply connected the unit to an Ethernet port, plugged it into a power outlet and turned it on.The SuperCD powered up, found our network and, without intervention, integrated itself into the Novell Directory Service (NDS) tree. At this point, your network administrator may have to assign an IP address, but that took no more than five minutes using the SuperCD software. SuperCD was online and ready in 30 minutes.

Features Rating: A The administrative functions are done using an intuitive and clear web-browser interface. CD-ROM images for network users were installed and mounted quickly and easily. Once our school’s network administrator established a network path to the images, nothing else needed to be done. The ‘CD-ROM’s were available to the network users.

For the individual network-user, the SuperCD is completely transparent – it just works. We tested SuperCD with several products and each software package ran flawlessly. From an operator’s perspective, that is the best feature of all. The ability to image DVD-ROMs as well as CD-ROMs means that workstations that don’t have a DVD-drive can access information and programs as if such drives were installed.

Additionally, for programs such as multimedia encyclopedias and other reference materials that come on multiple CD-ROMs, disk swapping to get to the ‘right’ disk, or taking up several bays on your CD-Tower becomes a thing of the past. The device is fast. In attempting to test the throughput function (I had every computer in my lab running Encarta at the same time, and had everyone click on the same video clip at once), I came up against our Local Area Network’s bandwidth design (100 Megabit) first.

Ease of Use Rating: A Whether you are the network administrator or an end-user, the SuperCD is very simple to use. The tools provided with the SuperCD make setup and administration of the SuperCD easier than similar processes on a CD-tower. Just the fact that the hard drive can hold many CD/DVDs, simplifies the administrator’s life because swapping CD’s out of the CD-tower drives depending on the needs of the teachers becomes unnecessary.

As already noted, the SuperCD is completely transparent to end-users as all one has to do is launch the application that uses one of the SuperCD’s images. The requested application starts, and then accesses the data on the CD image as if the physical CD were inserted in the workstation’s CD-ROM drive. In fact, it is even easier to use than the physical CD-ROM because the user does not have to insert the CD. Well done!

Product Support Rating: A The SuperCD manual is top-notch, one of the best I’ve seen in a long time. It is clearly written, well organized and finely illustrated. While we really didn’t have any trouble getting the SuperCD up and operating, the technical support phone calls were handled without problem, and without a long wait on hold.

Recommendation:: This is a superb product. It simplifies the administration of a networked, CD-ROM based library, while permitting network end-users access to CD/DVD-ROM-based software and files, even by computers not equipped with CD/DVD-drives. It’s difficult to find anything negative to say about the SuperCD. You would need several CD towers to begin to match the functionality and cost effectiveness of this one device.

More importantly, there’s just a lot less to go wrong with the SuperCD. It’s essentially a network server with a hard drive, and benefits from the availability/maintainability progress made recently in the design of network servers.