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Article #18991

Optical disks - advice?

#18991
From: John English
Date: Thu, 21 Jan 1993 15:08
29 lines
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I'm thinking of buying a rewritable optical disk in the near-ish future
and would be grateful for any advice...

My system is an ISA 486DX-33 with a pair of IDE drives (700M) and a 60M
tape drive & controller (QIC? not sure).  I'm running DOS and OS/2 and plan
to run a Unix (SCO or Linux) soon.  I'm drowning in floppies and am not
convinced of the reliability of tapes (I've lost a couple after leaving
them sitting on a shelf for a couple of months) so I thought a 3.5in 128M
optical drive would be more reliable (and the cartridges will take
up less space on the shelf!).

Does anyone out there have any experience with these drives (they seem to
be fairly new) -- good points, bad points, recommended manufacturers, etc.?
I presume they're SCSI devices, so I'll need a SCSI controller -- will I
get conflicts with the IDE controller? Are there any with a full set of
drivers available for the OSs I'm using? Are there any that can double
as a CD-ROM drive (or will I have to budget for one of those too, as
OS/2 releases seem to be coming out on CD only at the moment)?

All advice gratefully received.  E-mail responses to je@unix.brighton.ac.uk
and I'll summarise later if there's enough interest.
-- 
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
John English			| Fudd's first law of opposition:
Dept. of Computing		|    If you push something hard enough, it
University of Brighton		|    *will* fall over.
E-mail: je@unix.brighton.ac.uk	| Testlicle's deviant to Fudd's law:
Fax:    0273 642405		|    What goes in, must come out.
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From: je@unix.brighton.ac.uk (John English)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware
Subject: Optical disks - advice?
Message-ID: <1993Jan21.150824.6996@unix.brighton.ac.uk>
Date: 21 Jan 93 15:08:24 GMT
Organization: University of Brighton, UK
Lines: 29