#NEC-74 reliability
7 messages in this thread
Albert,
I don't know what type of failures were reported. All I know is that
two legal research CD-ROM salesmen recommended that I not buy the NEC-74
because a large percentage of them have been returned by customers because
of problems. The salesmen generally recommend the Toshiba 3301.
— EVAN
Evan,
As soon as I see salesmen I get suspicious. How much technical support do
they provide when setting up a CD-ROM drive. Do they work in Conjunction
with a dealer or someone else or NEC for technical support?
I'm sure if they were major problems it would probably be all over this
forum. But in case the Toshiba 3301 is a good alternative.
What drive are you interested in getting?
We sold two 74's, one was DOA. For the record.
Stephen,
Are you a CD-ROM dealer? Can you recommend a reasonably fast and very
reliable CD-ROM drive for use with legal research discs?
— EVAN
Yes we sell NEC drives. I still recommend the NEC since they have stood
behind the problems experienced and commit to longer temr support.
For instance, they upgraded 1990 and 1991 drives to the new MPC standard
for a modest sum. No one else was offereing that level of service. We had
several older drives that would have be relegated to text searching but are
not fast enough for multi-media.
Albert,
I, too, and always suspicious about anything a salesman says about his
product or the competition. However, these were software salesman. They
don't sell hardware, and so they have no apparent reason to give misleading
information about the drives, just about the discs.
I am considering the double-speed drives such as the NEC-74 and also the
Toshiba 3301. Can you recommend a particular reasonably fast drive for
office use?
— EVAN
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.