#buy CD-ROM drive
2 messages in this thread
Hi, everyone I am about to buy a 486 33dx machine and would like to add CD-ROm
to it with Windows. I'm not really interested in sound capability since I'll
be doing mostly text and graphics stuff. I used to Macs so I would prefer
something easy to install and if possible something that will run with my 386
notebook. I would appreciate any advice. jerome
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