#'Smart & Friendly' CDROM
8 messages in this thread
Has anyone heard of (or even better, used) a "Smart & Friendly" brand
CD-ROM drive? Telemart, the mail-order outfit has been advertising these,
and a salesman there claimed that the drive is the new Toshiba double-speed
unit. He faxed me the data sheet on it, and it appears to be faster than
the NEC CDR-74 unit — 200 msec ave access (1/3 stroke), 360 KBytes/sec,
256K buffer, and 4x oversampling on the audio outs.
The bad news is that Telemart allow *NO* hardware returns, so if you don't
like the unit, you probably gotta deal with the manufacturer (read
"importer") of the drive itself. They don't have a price yet…
– Barry
Never heard of a "Smart & Friendly" brand CD-ROM drive. The Toshiba 3401
is supposed to be out in Feb 1993. I would shop around for some more
dealers since they are quite a few available.
Do you have any specs on this Toshiba drive and how does it compare with
the NEC 74/84?
Thanks
Pat
The newer Toshiba 3301E is PhotoCD compatible, multi-session and a SCSI
drive. You can examine the file CDROMF.ZIP it gives the run down on
features of the different drives. Also you can download the file
KODAK.TXT. Both of these files have phone numbers of Toshiba where you can
get Contact information as well as NEC.
The NEC-74/84 is a single session Photo CD compatible model with double
speed 300k/s vs Toshiba's 150k/s. A newer Toshiba 3401 is coming out in
FEB 93 will have 300k/s and 200ms access time according to Toshiba.
Barry–
"Smart & Friendly" is a company that sells mostly CD-ROM drives
manufactured by others. They have their own tech support people. Out of
curiousity, what is Telemart's price for the external version of the new
Toshiba? One caveat: Toshiba may not support the drive since it won't have
their label on it.
Eric
Eric,
Telemart only has internal units at this point, although they say that
external units will also be available. Don't know the price of either…
–Barry
Barry:
This is all _verrry_ interesting. There is a message in the hardware
section from someone who heard this is a Sony drive. Otheres here in this
thread think it's a Toshiba. Do you have a phone number for this Telemart
company? Now I'm really curious.
>>The bad news is that Telemart allow *NO* hardware returns<<
I've heard of no software returns (although this policy seems pretty much
outdated in the m/o business), but no _hardware_ returns is bizarre. I
don't know how "Smart," but it sure doesn't sound very "Friendly"!
Let me know what you've learned, I'd like to follow up.
Thanks. — Rich Bowers
Rich —
Telemart's phone #: 1-800-521-1973
Yeah, their ads sort of indicate that it's a Sony drive, but I'm getting
the idea that the "Smart and/or Friendly" people OEM lots of stuff. When I
called them to ask about their product, I got a surprised-sounding person
in the distribution department who wanted to know who had given me his
phone number. Should've told him I was calling from the "Short & Sneaky"
company or some such thing.
— Barry