CD RW for my system

[rjindal]

Hi,

I have a olllldddd system, P1 200 Mhz with 64 MB RAM, I am looking to put a reliable CD writer in there. can anyone kindly suggest me any good one which can fit in to my system (most of them asks for 233 clock minimum).

Thanks for your help

Rajeev

[muchmark]

Hi rjindal,

Welcome to SysOpt we are glad to have you here.

The thing to remember is the minimum system requirement for CD Burners is what you need to burn at the maximum speed for that burner. eg. if you buy a 16X write you will need a P3 733 Mhz to write at 16X, however, that burner will write at 2X on a P1 200 Mhz.

Regards, Mark

[Peter M]

Sorry muchmark, this is utterly wrong. CD writing is not the least bit a CPU intensive task - it's all up to the storage controller and source media throughput.

See this thread "Can my system run CDRW" and the results we got there. 16x writing with a Pentium-200? No problem.

http://www.sysopt.com/forum/showthread.php?s=&threadid=90144

regards, Peter

[Alex Iannuzzi]

I had a 8x4x32 Acer Burner when I had a Pentium 200 MMX with 32 Mb Ram the only problem was that I had to restart my computer before burning a cd.

[rjindal]

Thanks everybody to give me more insight in this matter .. actually why I raised this point was that most companies whom I contact say that their CD RW (requiring 233 MHz upto 350 MHz clock speed) will not run on my system. Infact I tried buying an HP CD writer requiring 233 Mhz CPU and it didn't get installed so I assumed that may be I need something which says 200 Mhz or lower. would u suggest me to go out and try TDK Velo CD or something like that requiring (in specifications) a faster processor.

Thanks again,
Rajeev

[Peter M]

All you need to do is put that thing onto a bus mastering controller, and have your source drives (HDD, CDROM) on one as well.

If you're in doubt about the speed of the IDE channels on that old system (what chipset does that board use?), you're probably best off with Yamaha's special edition SCSI burner kit 2100S-VK-SE. That goes for a very decent price, and includes a basic but good enough SCSI controller card, and Nero 5.5 burning software.

regards, Peter

[Martingi]

Go with a Acer they are the best.:)

[LostBok]

Shouldn't cost too much more to get a SCSI.... but with current bus-mastering technology you are able to avoid creating too many coasters on IDE if the CPU/HDD can't handle the load.

My advice is to go and buy a decent, reliable 12x writer (Plextor/Ricoh/Yamaha) that has Buffer Under RuN (BURN) proof technology.. .sometimes it is called Just-Link or something like that. With a properly configured Pentium 200 Mhz system, it should work fine, provided you have at least mode 4 DMA enabled on the HDD and the CD writer.

The CPU load when writing under true 32-bit OS's is very low, so you should be fine with a P200 under NT4 or win2000, but might need more RAM for win2000... under win98 I used to have all sorts of problems writing CD's at higher speeds, but again you should be able to get it to work if bus mastering is enabled, plus possbly some more RAM if you wan tot multi-task while writing...