CD-ROM and CD-R on SGI (was Re: [rescue] Tape Backup)

[Sheldon T. Hall]

OK, I tried all three CD-ROM drives I have handy on my Sun SPARCstation LX
under Solaris 7, and my SGI Indigo2 under Irix 6.5.11.

The three, and my results, are ...

Imation 2x20 CD-R drive (really a Plextor PX-R920T). 20X reader, 8X burner.
Dunno if it will boot either the Sun  or the SGI, but it is set to 512
bytes/sector.  Won't do SGI-CD-audio-over-SCSI at all, but plays OK through
headphones with the cdheadphone program.  On the SGI, Failed to convert an
audio CD to digital files in preparation for copying the disk.  Haven't
tried using cdrecord to burn a data CD on either machine, as that's a much
more involved process than I'd imagined.

Plextor PX-20TSi. 20X reader.  Boots both Sun and SGI.  Reads data CDs just
fine.  Makes a nice, quick installation drive.  Won't do
SGI-CD-audio-over-SCSI at all, but plays OK through headphones with the
cdheadphone program.  Haven't tried using it to make data files from Audio
CDs.

Compaq (Matsushits) CR-503B.  2X reader.  Boots Sun and SGI.  Reads data CDs
fine. Won't do SGI-CD-audio-over-SCSI at all, but plays OK through
headphones with the cdheadphone program.  Haven't tried using it to make
data files from Audio CDs.  You haven't lived until you've used Sun's
execrable Hot Java browser to do a Webinstall on an IPX with one of these.

IN addition, I have a NEC CDR-512.  6X caddy-based reader.  Regardless of
the model number, it's neither a CD-R drive nor capable of being jumpered to
do 512 bytes/sector.  I haven't tried it with either the Sun or the SGI.

I'm really sorry to hear that it takes the SGI drive firmware to do
audio-over-SCSI n the Indigo2.  I can't make up my mind whether to buy an
SGI drive so I can do that, or just forget it.  Clearly, the Plextor burner
won't do as a one-drive audio-disk copying solution, so I don't know exactly
how I'm going to arrange things....

-Shel

P.S.  Here's another piece of Windows nonsense for your viewing pleasure.
I've got a Windows box with two hard drives and a CD-rom, all IDE.  Hard
drives are C: and D:, CD-rom is E.  Just as you'd expect.  The box has a
SCSI card in it, so I whip one of the SCSI CD-roms on there... and it
becomes drive D:!  The second hard drive becomes E: and the IDE CD-ROM is
F:.  Oh, and Windows crashes because its swap file is assigned to drive D:,
and CD-ROMs make notoriously bad swap drives....

-Shel