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Grex > Hardware > #155: Replacing a CD-ROM drive /w a CD-Recordable -- Many assorted questions! | |
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ryan
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Replacing a CD-ROM drive /w a CD-Recordable -- Many assorted questions!
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Sep 2 23:59 UTC 1998 |
This item has been erased.
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| 21 responses total. |
ryan
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response 1 of 21:
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Sep 4 23:20 UTC 1998 |
This response has been erased.
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arthurp
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response 2 of 21:
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Sep 8 02:13 UTC 1998 |
I hope it goes well. You can email with questions if you want.
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wolfg676
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response 3 of 21:
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Sep 9 12:56 UTC 1998 |
Your best bet is to use two CD-ROMs. One for everyday read-only use, and a
r/w drive for making CDs. Otherwise, your r/w drive may suffer the same fate
as your current CD-ROM and become clogged with dust, which won't be good
unless you want a lot of nice, shiny 5" coasters for your tables.
I work in a repair shop, and have resurrected more than a few aparrently dead
CD-ROMs by opening them up and giving them a good cleaning. Also, keep a can
of air around for dusting out the r/w drive's tray and cleaning any dust off
the CD before making a disc.
Audio CD's are easy, just as long as your HDD can keep up with the CD. Also
note that the original wavs take a lot of space, roughly 10MB/min at 44KHz
16-bit stereo. Most programs won't let you make an audio CD with wavs of lower
quality than that.
Also, by using your read-only CD-ROM, you can do direct CD-to-CD copies.
Useful for making "throwaway" copies of important CDs.
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ryan
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response 4 of 21:
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Sep 15 00:37 UTC 1998 |
This response has been erased.
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wolfg676
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response 5 of 21:
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Sep 16 16:51 UTC 1998 |
Make sure that you close the session when you burn a disc. (I found this
out the hard way.) Most older CD-ROMs have problems with multi-session discs.
Newer ones and CD-R/Ws can read them fine. Making a multi-session disc means
that you can add more data to a CDR that you've written to already. You might
be able to read a multi-session disc after you've closed the final session
on your older CD-ROM.
You can only burn to an audio CD once. You shouldn't have any problems reading
them in anything but the oldest CD players.
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ryan
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response 6 of 21:
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Sep 19 15:06 UTC 1998 |
This response has been erased.
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wolfg676
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response 7 of 21:
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Sep 20 06:57 UTC 1998 |
I think the "Close Session" option is somewhere in the settings menu, where
you choose what format you're recording in (CD-ROM, CD-XA, etc). I'll look
later on when I dump some of my oversized directories to CD tonight.
I'm beginning to seriously look into getting a bigger HDD. Anyone seen any
good deals on >8GB drives?
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ryan
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response 8 of 21:
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Sep 20 13:05 UTC 1998 |
This response has been erased.
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ryan
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response 9 of 21:
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Sep 21 21:28 UTC 1998 |
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n8nxf
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response 10 of 21:
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Sep 22 10:45 UTC 1998 |
What a pain!
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ryan
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response 11 of 21:
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Sep 25 00:56 UTC 1998 |
This response has been erased.
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n8nxf
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response 12 of 21:
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Sep 25 09:37 UTC 1998 |
The laser might be getting weak in you Discman.
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ryan
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response 13 of 21:
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Sep 25 23:24 UTC 1998 |
This response has been erased.
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wolfg676
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response 14 of 21:
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Sep 26 00:08 UTC 1998 |
Usually it's a good idea to test your CDR/W drive at lower speeds before
trying to max it out. You probably had some buffer underruns that caused the
static in your audio CDs. 2x is probably the best speed that you can burn
reliably at with a Dx4/100. You'll need a faster PC (K6-200+, P200+) to burn
at higher speeds reliably. Other factors are bus speed (Dx4/100 runs at 25MHz,
a K6/Pentium usually runs 66MHz or higher), HDD speed (you can buffer a CD
to your HDD first), and memory (amount: 32MB+, speed: <=60ns). YMMV.
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ryan
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response 15 of 21:
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Sep 26 01:34 UTC 1998 |
This response has been erased.
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wolfg676
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response 16 of 21:
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Sep 26 07:53 UTC 1998 |
I must've been thinking about my friend's machine. He's got a Dx4/100 w/32MB
of RAM.
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n8nxf
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response 17 of 21:
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Sep 28 16:56 UTC 1998 |
Were you doing other stuff on the machine while you were burning the CD?
Sounds like the computer was not able to keep up with the demands from the
CD burner. (Screen saver came on?)
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ryan
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response 18 of 21:
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Sep 28 21:11 UTC 1998 |
This response has been erased.
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ryan
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response 19 of 21:
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Nov 6 04:01 UTC 1998 |
This response has been erased.
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davel
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response 20 of 21:
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Aug 10 02:44 UTC 2000 |
Well, it's been a couple of years since anything was posted to this, and I
have questions tangentially related, so I thought I'd put them here rather
than starting a new item.
I've just gotten a CD-R/W drive. It's mostly working fine. But as I've
looked at the media, I'm kind of curious. I hadn't previously realized
that there were different CD-R/W disks, rated for different speeds.
(Ditto for CD-R disks.) I presume that if you try to exceed the nominal
rating you're greatly increasing your chances of errors. Is this a difference
of quality in essentially similar disks, or is there an actual difference in
what they're made of & how they're made?
I guess I'm also curious about the difference in the media between CD-R &
CD-R/W. But again, all this is just random curiosity - except that I wish
I'd noticed a bit earlier that some disks I got weren't quite the bargain I
thought they were.
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scott
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response 21 of 21:
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Aug 10 13:12 UTC 2000 |
In general0 you want to buy CD media rated as fast as you are planning to burn
them. You can still use 2x media in a faster burner as long as you set the
writing speed to 2x, for instance. These days it's hard to find anything
cheaper than 8x, and I've seen sales on 12x media by new companies looking
to get name recognition.
CD-Rs work by using the laser to shoot holes in one of the layers. CD-RWs
work by heating up a region (with the laser) and then using magnetic fields
to manipulate a layer in that region (MiniDiscs work this way).
As far as I've been able to tell, CD-Rs are all pretty much the same quality.
Ask me again in 10 years and I might have more data on longevity.
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