Date: Fri, 24 Aug 2001 16:48:39 -0500 From: David Kelly <dkelly@hiwaay.net> To: adyas@twowaytv.co.uk Cc: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: CD Writer Message-ID: <20010824164839.A60414@grumpy.dyndns.org> In-Reply-To: <20010822161746.B91302-100000@r2d2.twowaytv.co.uk>; from alex@twowaytv.co.uk on Wed, Aug 22, 2001 at 04:26:08PM %2B0100 References: <20010822161746.B91302-100000@r2d2.twowaytv.co.uk>
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On Wed, Aug 22, 2001 at 04:26:08PM +0100, Alex Dyas wrote: > My boss has tasked me with getting a FBSD machine up and running to use as a CD > writing station. I have the PC, just need to get the writer. What do people > suggest? Most FreeBSD compatible probably ranks as the highest priority for me, > before speed etc, and I would prefer IDE over SCSI. Depends a lot as to what you want to do with the CD-R as to whether or not you have to have SCSI. If you want to run cdrdao then you have to have SCSI until somebody cares enough who is capable enough to teach cdrdao another interface. I like to make "working copies" of my audio CD's for the car. Cdrdao not only writes, but makes simple work of reading the audio masters. And if lacking CD-TEXT it can fetch that information and add it to the copy. I already have SCSI interfaces, so that isn't an issue. Good Symbios based '875 cards were floating around last year for $40. The NCR/Symbios/LSI 81X/82X/87X/89X based cards are excellent values, many can not tell the difference in performance vs. Adaptec's best. Adaptec makes some trash as well. Stay away from the cards designed to be bundled with CDROMs and the like. Have never used a 2930 in FreeBSD but have 2 in Macs and they are OK. But even the oldest surplus 2940 would be a good choice to host your CD-RW. This is the 8/4/32 SCSI CD-RW I bought last year for about $130: cd0: <HP CD-Writer+ 9200 1.0e> Removable CD-ROM SCSI-4 device cd0: 10.000MB/s transfers (10.000MHz, offset 15) cd0: cd present [324007 x 2048 byte records] da0 at sym0 bus 0 target 0 lun 0 Bought the above HP SCSI drive after a Philips "803" or something (roughly same specs as the HP above) turned out to be junk. Had two problems. First was reading a CD raw with dd came up one block short. Second was no matter what software was used to burn the CD-R (burncd and the bundled Adaptec software under NT4) the drive had a terrible time reading its own work. Different brands of media made little difference. My old stock of 4x Verbatim was unusable. The blanks included with the drive were no better. Was glad to only pay 15% or 20% to Circuit City to get rid of it. This is the drive widely advertised in the US at $60 or $70 after rebates. Only reason I bought the Philips IDE CD-RW was because the Sony something-160E turned out to be a winner every which way I tried. The bundled software stinks/stank/stunk. But the drive works great. Sony has recently upgraded the software and I haven't given that much of a run. The original version had C:\ hardcoded somewhere in its temp scratch space path in spite of a user option to move elsewhere. Burncd under FreeBSD works very well with it. Am thinking about a firewire CD-RW as a companion for iTunes on my Mac. -- David Kelly N4HHE, dkelly@hiwaay.net ===================================================================== The human mind ordinarily operates at only ten percent of its capacity -- the rest is overhead for the operating system. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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