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On Thu, 8 May 1997, John Kim wrote: > > Is anyone else thinking about basing their backup strategies on > > write-once CD ROM drives? I'm planning on it, but have been holding > > out for the price of 4x write CD-R (record once) cd drives to come > > down enough. > > > > Though 650 MB isn't huge - nowhere near travan TR-4 4GB - the media is > > so convenient! I envision copying the image of the installed OS on > > At work, we've got both DAT drives and CD-Rs, and you're right > about the the CDs being more convenient. Another not-so-trivial > benefit is the ability to mix your own audio and Photo CDs. Put > 70 minutes of your favorite songs on one CD and play that in > your car, instead of ejecting and inserting a half dozen > different CDs while driving. (As a matter of fact, i'm very eager to record some of the vinyl albums i love, which would never otherwise appear in CD format. I even plan to splurge on a nice, low noise-floor digitizer, to produce good copies. When it comes to the audio considerations, "buffer underflow" becomes a danger, so your cautions about fast processor/bus become even more important.) > > (I would be doing all this on my desktop PC, but there are external > > CD-R drives available that could be hooked up with a SCSI port on a > > TP.) > > What I've heard is that because the CD-R writes in one > continuous track (like the old phonograph grooves), the PC > *must* be able to pump data to the drive without fail. Don't Actually, i gather the situation is a bit more complicated than this. It's become a regular thing to write CD-R data in smaller than whole-disk chunks, though some space is wasted closing and reopening "sessions". Even there, packet writing enables session continuation with no or at least less waste. And sony's "Direct CD" innovations make it easy to treat the CD-R as a sort of regular disk, though slow and without space freed up. I'm not sure whether buffer underflow issues obtain generally or just for sensitive situations, like writing continguous audio tracks - but i would investigate carefully before considering running one of these things from any TP. It is stil fairly new for non-specialized use... Ken