From: John Kim (kim_at_stormhaven.org)
Date: Thu Jan 07 1999 - 16:25:21 EST
On Thu, 7 Jan 1999, Randal Whittle wrote:
> I'm a recent inductee into the CD-RW club and have been reading up on this
> a lot lately.
>
> From what I understand, its not that the disks are 2x or 4x, it has more
> to do with the quality of the disks. Lesser-quality disks often have to
> revert to 2x writing speed. Furthermore, some drives--plain old
Some CD-RW disks are certified for 2x, others are certified
for 4x. When I pop in a 2x disk, I don't even get the option
to try to write to it at 4x. That option is greyed out. So
somehow, the disk is telling the drive not to try writing to
it faster than 2x.
> I got the Yamaha 2216 (2x write, 2x re-write, 16x reading) instead of the
> 4416 (4x write and re-write) simply to save the extra $100 I would have
> paid for the faster drive. I don't regret it, really. 2x isn't going to
> win any races, but frankly, neither is 4x. Of course it depends on how
I would much rather pay $100 to go from 30 min to 15 min (a
net savings of 15 minutes), than pay $100 to go from 8x to 16x
(from 8 min to 4 min, for a net savings of 4 minutes). I have
a 20x CD-ROM reader right now, and I frankly don't see the
point in upgrading it to 32x or 40x or whatever the latest
speed is, because 20x is already plenty fast enough. The
biggest difference in wait times is at the low speeds.
> As long as we're on this, do you know of a convenient/quick way to copy
> lots of files from a CD to a HD and either *not* have the "Read-only"
> attribute copied over or a quick way to turn that attribute off en-masse
> once copied?
I don't think I've run into this problem. I'm using CD-R
primarly to backup unix tarfiles and make audio CDs. I've
relegated the CD-RWs for Windows duty.
> My TP600 has cardbus, but I just migrated my existing PC cards over to it
> and didn't get any fancy cardbus cards for it. For Ethernet in particular,
> in order for me to enjoy the benefit of 100 MB/sec, I'll have to upgrade
> the card in my desktop PC, my little hub, and if that isn't enough, I think
I think a major benefit of Cardbus over PCMCIA is that it uses
the PCI bus, instead of the ISA bus. Your laptop will suffer
much less CPU usage with a Cardbus card than with a PCMCIA
card.
> For the amount of file transferring I do, its quite adequate. The number
> of occasions where I have to transfer a *lot* (and therefore have to wait)
> are pretty few. Usually its only a 10 MB or so at a time, and almost never
> more than 30 MB.
Heh heh. Wait until you get a cable modem like I've got. :-)
-- John H. Kim kim_at_stormhaven.org
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