By Mark Crane (Mecran01) on Friday, February 11, 2000 - 02:19 pm:

Ok, finally a real newbie question. What is the difference between a CD recoder and a CD-rw (read/write?). This was covered in the old shoptalk, but I lost the post (hey, where did that glowing brick come from?).

Can you even buy a strict record-only burner anymore? HP doesn't seem to carry one. At least not an external one. Blah.

And aren't the RW discs much more expensive? My department has approved a purchase, so I need a crash course in burning CDs and which model to purchase.

Cnet likes the latest HP and Panasonic externals, and they're about $300. (more for an external). Both come with Adaptec "directcd".

Hopefully they'll work with NT.

thanks,

Mark Newbie Crane

By Timmy Tuner (Tatertot) on Friday, February 11, 2000 - 04:55 pm:

CD-RW drives can burn CD-RW and CD-R media. So think of CD-RW as a superset of CD-R. The price difference between the drives is pretty minimal now, and CD-RW media isn't really that more expensive, if you can find a good deal. I've gotten CD-RW disks for about $3 apiece. DirectCD is nice, since it lets you treat CD-RW like a big floppy - just drag and drop.

How's that fireplace coming?

By Mark Crane (Mecran01) on Friday, February 11, 2000 - 05:04 pm:

Coooool. Ok, I think I've got a fix on it now. Probably get the HP because they are more likely to have NT drivers (just a guess). The fireplace is almost built. Actually, I don't really care about the archive that much, just thought I would drag out a dumb joke as long as humanly possible...

But I am stoked to be getting a CD burner. It's going to make my job a lot easier, plus I'll have scads of mix cds to make!!!!

By Gareth Branwyn (Gareth) on Friday, February 11, 2000 - 11:45 pm:

BTW, Mark, CD-RW stands for "Re-writable"

Also, I've heard that CD-RW media is not good for recording music. I assume that means recording music *over* existing data, but I could be wrong.

By Mark Crane (Mecran01) on Saturday, February 12, 2000 - 01:22 pm:

Aaaah. Enlightenment has struck. Incidentally, when I posted this question to the Labmgr list, several suggested alternatives to the CD backup scheme, including just lugging around a spare drive and writing the disk image to the drive, and/or making a boot floppy with network connectivity and writing the disk image to a server. Both sound do-able, but not as convenient. Plus we could use the CD burner to burn multimedia disks. Ok, we've left newbie country and I'll move this to "Ask Streettech" from here on out. Thanks.

By Mike Clark (Mikeclark) on Saturday, February 12, 2000 - 05:33 pm:

Hey Mark -

CD-RW performs well as long as you are writing and reading back with the same drive. It doesn't do as well if you are writing, re-writng and trying to share the data with another user. For someone who needs a back-up or temporary archive the technology is great. But the message stream above mentions "mix CDs", "recording music" and "multimedia disks". I think you've moved beyond the intended application.

You have to convince the powers that be that in a very short period of time this CD thing will become an "overused" resource. You'll be able to charge other departments for making CDs.

I'm not familiar with HP model numbers but most of their writers were for that single user "backup" application, they may not be "A/V" rated for the music and multimdia applications.

I may have mentioned this before but Imation is putting their name on a PLEXTOR 8X writer and bundling a SCSI card, cable and Easy CD Creator for less than $380.00.

By Jay Townsend (Artdog) on Monday, February 14, 2000 - 09:18 am:

In addition, many CD players cannot play CD-RW discs. Some even have trouble with certain brands of CD-R because of they don't reflect enough light to be read properly by all CD players. I've got CD-Rs that play perfectly in some of my CD players, but not in others. Oddly enough, it's not always the same the machines that refuse to play CD-Rs. My cheap boombox will play things that my higher-end stereo won't and vice-versa.