CompuServe Messages

Couple of things. Regardless of your present interest in sound, I would suggest not making a choice today which limits you tomorrow. So, don't consider anything without at least a headphone jack and 150 KBytes per second sustained data transfer rate (MPC-compliant). The best drives, in terms of speed, on the market right now seem to be NEC CDR-74 and CDR-84 and TEXEL DM-3024 and DM-5024. Texel probably has just a bit of a speed advantage and, so far as I can tell, no one can actually get the NEC drives right now since the supply pipeline is dry as a bone. But, here's one further consideration. If you're going to use the drive with a portable computer, you're probably going to use one of the external parallel-to- SCSI adapters from Trantor, NEC, etc. to make the connection. These will limit your sustained data transfer rate to 150 KBytes per second or less, so you will loose the speed advantage of the NEC or TEXEL drives while in your portable mode. (They operate at about 300 KBytes per second when hooked directly to a SCSI adapter.) If speed is not as much of a concern and you don't want the top specs of these drives, then you can buy any of a slew of others, including the $200 variety from DAK, for half the money of the NEC/TEXEL models. Hope this helps. -Steve Shaffer