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Paul,
I too have been using CD-ROM Recordables here, and am quite pleased with
being able to pop 600+ MB of data into my computer quite easily...moreover,
to be able to carry it around to various sites and use it with their CD
drives (which is not the case for optical MO's or Bernoullis). [Guess I
should qualify that: all the new BD FACStation systems have a standard
interal double-speed CD-ROM drive.]
I however have had some interesting experiences.... I purchased the Pinnacle
unit, which is a single speed drive, for about $4K a year ago. The software
included (yep, I got the Mac version) was both simple to use and quite
efficient. Unfortunately, the documentation that came with the drive was
seriously lacking; I ended up spending about 5 hours on the phone to their
tech support before I got everything humming smoothly. It has since worked
like a charm.
One issue that was left out during the pre-sales discussions was the need
for a high-speed disk drive to master from. Apparently, this particular
CD-ROM Writer requires a disk drive that will feed data to it continuously,
without ANY interruption. Problem is that most hard disk units today have
a thermal recalibration cycle (ever noticed your hard disk chattering by
itself unattended?), and if that cycle is more than a few microseconds, the
data transfer from the drive is interrupted. This is what caused my first
two CD's to be trashed. I finally found out from Pinnacle that I needed an
"AV" drive, one that had a hidden thermal recal...and for only a thousand
more found such a drive in a 1GB capacity. Now, things work fine.
For those who don't have the budget, I've also seen ad's in the popular
computer rags to do one-off CD's for around $100 per CD.
Your comment about cutting two CD's is commendable...the CD-R media I am now
discovering is a little more sensive than pressed CD's. For the cost of the
extra CD, it's well worth it.
Question - have you tried to do multiple writes to a CD-R? I thought that
one could write a small partition (i.e. 100MB) to the CD, then later add
another small partition; however, I have as yet been able to do it. Have
you tried that?
Best Regards,
Mike Lance
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