Mail Archives: opendos/2001/02/16/02:33:16
Pat wrote:
>In fact faster CDROMs have more of
>a tendency to skip on audio CDs that slower ones. I have seen this many,
>many times. An audio CD will play fine in a 2X or 4X drive and skip like
>crazy in a 12X, 16X, or higher speed drives.
A faster CD will not be so forgiving for errors on the surface etc. as a
slower would.
I've never had any problems with my 32X Pioneer (a slot-in actually, now I
can't understand how I could live without one earlier <g>).
>Even when loading software like NT which is huge, I have not notice my
>drive taking longer than his drive takes and we both have comparable
>systems as far as speed it concerned. However, when I bought mine I got
>one with very low access time, so that may in itself make up the
>difference in speed for loading software. Mine is something like 80ms
>access time.
Yes, especially DVDs are bad at this (some has in the same range as the
first 1X CDs). But a newer CD can have better (mine has 65ms).
>I just never could see wasting money to buy something faster that would
>never be needed.
You obviously don't use it much. I'm getting very tired of my CD-R that
only reads in 8X :(
>I am perfectly happy with this old 4X CDROM and will
>only change it out when ever I get one of those DVD RAM drives. Those do
>not have blazing CDROM read speeds either.
You are aware that 1X DVD ~ 11X (IIRC) CD, right?
The specs for reading CDs on them is also very good (something like 32X and
up). A problem with them is (as I mentioned above) the long seek times on
some of them, they are also very bad at reading data burned in CD-Rs.
>For audio CDs you only need a 1X or 2X drive (I don't recall which the
>audio CD speed is.)
1X (of course <g>).
>Since most
>CDROMs write trandfer rate is very slow, you can connect a SCSI CD
>burner to a SCSI port coverter connected to a USB port and not lose any
>speed.
I don't think that USB can not keep up with something like 8X and above
CD-Rs. USB 2.0 can on the other hand, and may be worth investigating as an
alternative. Now all we need are drivers in DOS ;-)
>This would be good for slow devices like CDROMs,
(snip)
Is 40X slow? I think 16X is fast. The others you mention are slow devices,
but since you can't afford a SCSI HD (a 9.5GB costs more than a 46.1GB
drive) there's not much use for it. I do recomend a SCSI CD-R since you'll
probably have 0 (yes zero!) CDs to trash. Noone that I know who owns an IDE
CD-R can say the same, and I had almost 100 busted CDs when I used some
crappy IDE CD-R from HP that I told the store where I had bought it that I
wanted a new SCSI CD-R instead so I could get one that worked. They took my
old 2X back and gave me a new 4X. Of course they tried to complain a bit,
but there are some laws that apply for the customers (here anyway).
>What if
>you were to disable one of the drives in the CMOS setup and enable the
>one you want to use each time you want to change drives?
I don't think that would work since some BIOSes find the CDs anyway.
Wouldn't it be easier to load the driver for the CD you want in config.sys?
>When I
>first got my Syquest drive, they sent me an IDE version. I immediately
>sent it back and exchanged it for a SCSI because that is what I had
>ordered. Who knows what kind of problems I may have had with it.
The IDE version would also cost around 100 USD less. But that's the closest
a SCSI drive has come in diffrence with a IDE, the diffrence is bigger now.
//Bernie
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