[geeks] CD recorder opinions

[Michael A. Turner]

> My suggestion is to not use IDE :)
> 
> Of course they work ok if you want to mess around with
> scsi emulation but with scsi cdrs at less than $100 bucks
> shipped (and SCSI Plextors at just over $100), it's hard to
> convince myself to do so.
> 
> That being said, i have used Smart & Friendly, Rioch and
> Yamaha IDE burners with great success in the past.
> 
> /KRM

	I just replaced two Yamaha Scsi Burners with an IDE myself and so
far I am happy. One of the Yamahas was purchased second hand flaky and the
second I simply wore out. My big complaint is that Most SCSI burners are
still 50 pin while the rest of the system is LVD 68. I realize that the
burner only needs 10MB a sec to be efficient but I don't want to string the
extra cable. 
	They have started to make 68 pin SCSI burners but they are still in
the $200 range. I priced that against the $50 for a digital research IDE
burner at 48X and dropped the Scsi burner on this iteration. I found that an
ultra 160 drive throwing to an ATA133 IDE bus has been just as efficient as
going straight across the 39160 Adaptec card I was using. This, of course,
depends on the fact that the burner is the only thing on the IDE bus. The
simple I/O of the IDE which makes it inefficient as  a medium in data
transfers to and from a hard drive works very well in a case where you are
either sending nothing but data, burning, or reading only from a write
protected media. 
	The point being that IDE does not suck for Burners IMHO.

Michael A. Turner
Systems Engineer WHRO
michael.turner at whro.org
http://www.whro.org