CompuServe Messages

Evan, How much time do you have before you must absolutely have a CD-ROM drive? I have an NEC-73 and it works quite well for everything I've used it for. It wouldn't recommend it now since they are several others that are faster and have more updated features. The Toshiba 3401 sounds like it should be good when it is released in Feb. I think I saw something about legal research discs in one of your earlier messages. Another point to consider is how good the retrieval engines are and how well the data is indexed. If the engines aren't done very well then the speed of the disc is not going to make too much different on accessing a particular piece of data. Also have you used any CD-ROM drive with your particular CD-ROM disc? Be sure not to compare CD-ROM speeds to hard disks because they are quite different. A Hard disk is around 20ms or less on the average while a CD-ROM is 350 ms on average. Download the file CDROMF.ZIP it lists quite a few drives, their specs including speed.