I am looking to add a CD-R drive to my computer. Being the rabid “smart shopper” that I am, I was hoping to get some input on the best drive for my purposes.
I will mostly be using this to copy music CD’s. I do a lot of Grateful Dead and Phish trading, so the drive will mostly be used for that purpose. I would like it to do this reliably, and relatively quickly (although speed is not a huge issue). I don’t care how well it re-writes, since I’ll be doing that rarely if ever. Of course, I don’t want to spend any more than I have to.
Pay a visit to Mediastore. They sell really good stuff for decent prices. As and employee and a shareholder, I should insist that you buy all you gear from Hewlett-Packard . . . but I’m not as blindly loyal as I should be.
Handy–Phish, the Dead, and many other such bands enourage taping and trading of their live performances, as long as they are not sold. They have a special section set up for tapers, in fact.
I have collected shows on analog tapes for several years now, but most people are moving to CD’s since burners are getting cheap.
I would not be using my burner to pirate commercial CD’s. I can understand your confusion, though.
One question, that the more computer savvy might help me with: what is the difference between an SCSI and an EIDE drive? That is, what are the real practical differences? I know that the SCSI drives cost more and will require more tinkering to set up, since you have to install the new interface, but is there a real difference in the performance of the drive?
SCSI drives are not particularly difficult to install. You have to have an IRQ available, and you will might have to make sure that the drive is set to terminate the bus, and if the controller has a BIOS it should be disabled (since you won’t be booting off a SCSI drive). If you buy a drive-and-controller kit it will probably come all set up correctly.
The bane of CD-R drives is “buffer underrun”. Once you start burning, the burning head needs an absolutely steady and uninterrupted stream of data. The faster the burner, the faster the required data stream. All drives have buffers to handle short interruptions in the stream of data from the computer bus; but if the buffer goes empty, or “underruns”, during the burn … your CD-R becomes a coaster.
SCSI drives are noticably better than EIDE drives at keeping that buffer full. However, if you are willing to do nothing else with your computer while burning, you are probably safe with an EIDE drive. You may even get away with doing a little something else while an EIDE drive burns, but no guarantees.
SCSI drives do indeed cost more than EIDE drives.
SCSI is also better than EIDE at adding lots of drives on the bus (although the cheap cards you get in kits sometimes have limitatins as to howmany drives they can support). It sounds as if this doesn’t matter to you.
For completeness, one more thing that probably doesn’t matter; EIDE drives are more likely to be supported by the copying programs that do particularly well at copying … er … “difficult” disks. Like CloneCD.
The best deal I’ve found so far is the Sony Spressa CRX140E/CH2. 8x4x32x, apparently very reliable and with a great software bundle. $174.99 at Egghead.
Continuing the thought on those “difficult” cds to copy. It makes it much easier to copy if you get a burner that supports a raw data mode (bit by bit, rather than viewing the cd as a whole) which is what I think Jonf was alluding to about EIDE drives being more likely to copy successfully.
You do need another cdrom drive if you are going to copy to make it easy. Or you can get a 1. cdrw & 2. a dvd drive, which reads cds & in the future, when you get a dvd writer, youll be all set to copy.
DoctorJ, I don’t know if you’ve already bought a CD burner, but here’s my $00.02
-A lot of IDE burners are actually SCSI- they come with a SCSI card that plugs into your PCI slot (Make sure you have an available PCI slot before buying one!) SCSI allows for more data to be transferred and might be necessary for higher speed (4x, 6x, 8x+) burns or CD to CDR burns.
-For equipment, I have a Creative CDR (4x write, 2x rewrite- which I never use) on a P200. The software package that comes with your burner is important. Most burners come with Adaptec’s suite which I’m not too fond of. I highly recommend Nero- It’s intuitive and reliable. I paid $150 for this package a year ago.
-The biggest problem I ran into during install was the jumper pin settings- I ran through every configuration before it finally worked.
-If you use Adaptec, you have to use the “Disc at Once” settings to eliminate the 2 sec. gap between songs (better continuity for live shows)- this also increases chances for making a coaster of your CD. In Nero, simply right click>properties and change the delay from 2 to 0. I strongly recommend doing the CD track layout, saving it, rebooting your PC just prior to each burn and testing the burn the first time with that layout.
-If you have any questions or problems (or trades!) please e-mail me
