#Mitsumi-should I buy one
4 messages in this thread
I'm looking seriously at a purchase of one of the Mitsumi internal
drives. Since I can get one for $200, and the next least expensive drive in
this area runs for $500, the price of the Mitsumi looks very attractive.
First, I'm curious to learn how the Mitsumi performs, as opposed to
the Matsushita drive in the Creative Labs package, or the Sony drive in the
Laser Library — the other two CD-ROM's I'm considering. Do the more
expensive drives have a performance advantage which justifies the higher
price?
Second, I want to know how easily the Mitsumi installs, as
contrasted to the other drives. That question comes from the equipment
already in my 33-MHz 386 clone. I have used all of the lower bank of
hardware interrupts: IRQ2 belongs to a bus mouse, 3 and 4 are used by
serial ports, 5 is filled by a Sound Blaster card, and 7 is assigned to
LPT1. I understand the Mitsumi needs one of those lower interrupts. Is
there any way to get around that? Do the Matsushita and Sony drives I'm
also considering use hardware interrupts? What about DMA channels used by
those drives?
I'd appreciate any advice you can offer on this hardware. I'm
interested in CD-ROM, but I'm not yet convinced, because of these hardware
questions.
Let's see which to answer first. The difference between the units is
speed. If you are a speed junkie spend the bucks. If not don't the
interrupts are not a problem as SB can use 10 freeing up 5. THe PAnasonic
and the sony use IRQ, however there is a SCSI ver of the SOny that doesnot
require an IRQ Frank Harris Computron, Ltd.
As someone already mentioned, you can change the SoundBlaster's default IRQ
to free up one for the Mitsumi (which can use IRQ2, 3, or 5). The Mitsumi
can use DMA transfer if you've got channel 1 or 3 available. If not, it
allows a software transfer method which does not require a DMA channel.
Installation is just a matter of mounting the drive, plugging a power cable
(check to make sure you have one free), slipping the 8-bit proprietary
interface card into a free slot, connecting a data cable between card and
drive, and connecting an audio passthru wire between card and drive. A
driver which takes up around 25K is loaded in CONFIG.SYS (can be loaded
high), and Microsoft extensions are optionally added to AUTOEXEC.BAT.
There is a simple install on the drivers disk, or your can simply do the
copy and edit yourself. The box contains both 3.5 and 5.25 diskettes.
You'll want to check that you've got the current driver version (1.50A).
For me, the choice was to buy the Mitsumi or not buy a CDROM drive at all.
I would suggest you look first to the CDROM titles that are available which
appeal to you. If you want to get serious about multimedia, the Mitsumi
will be disappointing. If you just want to be able to access reams of
data, the Mitsumi's speed is far faster than any other solution anywhere
near its price range. (Try hunting through 500 floppies and see how fast
things go! Or look for 600M of removable hard disk storage and see if you
pay $200.) Based on the relatively few titles available and the even
smaller subset of those titles that I wanted to use, the Sony's and NEC's
were not justifiable, but that's just me talking. Also consider whether
you care about Kodak's Photo CD. The Mitsumi definitely won't cut it if
you do (although, by the looks of it, not many low to mid range players
will).
We've seen some problems using Mitsumi CD-ROM drives in a CD-ROM server.