Need help chosing a new cd-rom drive...please help me!

[CH75]

I recently purchased an HP 8200i cd-rw for my HP 6350 computer. My problem is that the Goldstar 24x cd-rom installed in my computer has a DAE rate of 212 kn/sec. NOT GOOD! The tech suggested I buy a new cd-rom drive. It has to be an IDE interface. I was looking at either the Afreey or Asus 50x cd-rom drive, but not sure, they look awfully complicated with thier different modes and DMA (???) settings. I am looking for a good IDE drive, one that installs easily, is recognized my win 98....and one that has good digital audio extraction. Whew....thats all I have on my wish list. Can anyone suggest any of these models, or even something different?? I can use all the help I can get. I am looking to buy online as my local store only carries I/O Magic and Digital Research brands. Please post here or email me direct beanbag101@email.com Thank you so much.

[chipbgt]

Hi CH75, and welcome to Sysopt! I hope you'll find that this site has some of the friendliest and most helpful people out there.

As for my opinion on this, which to be honest is probably not too extensive, I have never seen much hoopla over different brands of cd-rom drives. they are getting pretty cheap these days compared to most hardware items. I had a SamSung 48x IDE cd rom recently, but when I added a cd-rw and a dvd drive, I took the cd-rom out. both of the other drives read cd's around 24x, which to me has handled everything I have thrown at it so far.

but I know your looking for more technical info than this http://www.sysopt.com/forum/smile.gif But to me a cd-rom drive has become like floppies; slap anyone in there (assuming its a new one) and it will work fine.

I hope someone else helps out with more info though!

[This message has been edited by chipbgt (edited 01-12-2000).]

[CH75]

Thank you....Just knowing there is someone out there that listens and is willing to give advice is great! This is a great board, the best I have seen. You can post until you are blue in the face on some of the others, but you will never get a responce from anyone! Thank you so much for taking the time to read and respond to my post.

[Mntsnow]

CH75, Welcome and you have found a "new home" (I see you will fit right in here as you are from FRIENDSHIP, WI) here at SysOpt. As Chipbgt stated I too have found that just about any of the CDrom drives will do just fine as long as it's spec's meet what you are looking for. As for what you have avalible at your local store..I personally would go for the I/O magic brand as it's drives are actually made by BTC http://www.sysopt.com/forum/smile.gif. I personally do not like as I have seen to many failures with the Digital Research brand to even consider it http://www.sysopt.com/forum/frown.gif

Mntsnow

[Donkey]

Buy a DVD drive. Cd drives will be a bit pointless when games etc start to ship on DVD. Not that much more expensive anyway.

[welsh wizard]

I have to go with Donkey here, prob find plain CDRoms will be Dodo's in a few years time and if your into games it will beat 4 or 5 disc swaps while playing.( just make sure its a good one)
WW

[BEOR999]

Copying audio digitally from a CD requires a CD-ROM drive or CD recorder which supports digital audio extraction (DAE). All CD recorders can perform DAE. Many CD-ROM drives do not support DAE at all; others do it, but not very well. Few (if any) high speed CD-ROM drives can extract audio successfully at or even near their top-rated data speed. You alredy have an HP 8200i cd-rw so that will do the DAE.

With that in mind, The solution is to slow down DAE. However, with some drives, getting a clean audio extraction requires reading at very slow speeds. Sometimes the drive will go back and re-read the same audio samples over again to make sure that everything is in the right place. At times, the read will be so slow that it is impossible to copy directly from your source audio CD to the CD recorder, because the read speed is slower than the recorder's write speed. In this case, you will have to copy the audio tracks to hard disk and then record them back to CD.

Thus I do not think that you REALLY need to buy a new drive, or at the very least, puchace a 2gb HDD to use only for the copied DAE file

[JimG]

In your message, you wrote about buying a new CD-ROM drive and judging from the "DMA(??)" part, nobody's told you what DMA is. DMA stands for direct memory access. In basic english, it means that the HD and CD-ROM can transfer data without having to go through the CPU.
I have a Creative Labs 48x CD-ROM and Western Digital HD. Both support DMA access; and I find it gives a much faster transfer rate.
If you don't have any fears of buying online, check out www.buycomp.com. (http://www.buycomp.com.)
I bought my processor and some other things from them, and found them to be very reliable.
You'll get a wider selection of CD-ROMs and maybe at a better price.
Good luck!

[CH75]

Thank you for explaining that to me! I had no idea what it means. Today I purchased an Asus 50X EIDE cd-rom. I just decided to take the plunge and see what happens. I ordered online, so it won't be here for a few days now. The one I bought was Ultra DMA....when talking to the HP tech they said that it may cause conflicts with my computer, but they weren't sure. They suggested that I disable, or not bother to turn on the DMA feature. I checked out buy.com and they were out of stock, thank you for the tip. I bookmarked the site for further purchases! Pretty soon I think I am going to have to break down and buy a new computer. Mine is a year and a half old, and already feels so out dated. I hope I will be able to get the new cd-rom installed and working so I can copy from disk to disk on my cd-rw. Thanks for all of your help. I hope I wont be posting saying "Help, I crashed my computer trying to install hardware!" You all have been so great, Thank you!

[Underclocked]

Absolutely on the Asus choice, but the 40x is more widely available and I think may actually read a bit better from varying formats. I've had both.
Afreey is good if you like the sounds of a brush hog. http://www.sysopt.com/forum/wink.gif