🚀 go-pugleaf

	Sorry to take up space, but more than a few people asked me to summarizethe information. Thanks to all who helped, and please let me know if you have
used other drives successfully. Thanks.

				Begin Forwarding

From strobel@dirac.phys.washington.edu Tue Sep 29 18:30:55 1992
Date: Tue, 29 Sep 92 18:30:55 -0700
From: Nicolas Strobel <strobel@dirac.phys.washington.edu>
To: sasha1@cats.UCSC.EDU
Subject: Re: Which CD Players Work?
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next.hardware
References: <1a6braINN31f@darkstar.UCSC.EDU>
 
Here's an article I posted a few months ago about CD-drives and NeXT. The
article is old--there are now other drives that work too.
 
I've received a few replies to my request for CD-Rom drive performance info and
have done some reading around.
The NeXT drive performance seems to fall right in with the rest of CD drive
pack with access times ~300 ms and transfer rates of 150 KB/sec. The exception
to all the others is the leader of the pack NEC 73M and 74 with transfer rates
of 300 KB/sec. 
        Calling around in Seattle, I got prices ranging from $500-650 for an 
external SCSI drive with the NEC at the top end. The educational price for the
NeXT drive + 3.0 is $595 (! at the UW bookstore, why so expensive?). So after 
doing some quick checking around, the NeXT promo offer looks good for one 
on a student budget and I'll prepare myself for trying to get an order for the 
NeXT drive through our bookstore.
 
Nick
strobel@dirac.phys.washington.edu
 
Here's the replies I received:
 
from: scotty@l5next.gagetalker.com (Scott Turner)
 
The NEC CDR-73M has been replaced with the NEC CDR-74. Both drives  
have a data transfer rate of over 300KB per second. The Toshiba 3301  
and NeXT drives have a transfer rate of 153KB per second. The NEC  
drives are also faster on seek times, but the differences in seek  
time are minor compared to the difference in data transfer rate.
The NEC CDR-73M has a problem with the NeXT in that the NeXT doesn't  
tell it to eject the disc. A panel pops up and asks you to eject the  
disc manually. Other than that the CDR-73M works fine.
I have not tested a CDR-74 with a NeXT.
Price wise I can't help you much. I buy through distribution so I  
don't know what the street price is on these drives.
 
From: Eric Thayer <eht@moo.SPEECH.CS.CMU.EDU>                                   
 
They [the Sun drive and NeXT's] seem to be fairly equivalent in terms of 
performance.  Dunno what the Sun drive costs.  I got a NeXT one recently and 
traded in my Sun.  No particularly compelling reason other than the NeXT drive 
is black.
 
From: rockbox!bob@pirates.Armstrong.EDU (Robert J. Rockefeller)
 
...
There seems to be two major suppliers of the CD-ROM drive mechanisms used
by almost everyone - Toshiba and Sony. Hardware drive performance is
similar at about 300ms seek and 150 MB/sec transfer. I see that NEC makes a
multi-spin version of their popular drives that deliver 300 MB/sec
transfer, but I don't know if they are NeXT compatible. Software (driver)
performance may vary, but I have no data.
CD-ROM drives are becoming more popular every day for Macintosh. You may
want to keep an eye on the major Macintosh magazines (MacUser and MacWorld)
for lab test reports on these drives. Then you could contact the
manufacturer of the best drives and confirm their use on NeXT.
...
 
From: todd@liveware.com (Todd Nathan)                                           
 
I don't know the complete spectrum of options, compatability issues and such. I
have an Apple CD-SC that is a Sony 541-22 mechanism and works just great. It is
the ONLY drive that NeXT tested (to date in April, and thus this may have 
changed since).  It works great and we got PR1 and PR2 up and running no 
problems. It is kinda fast. I have heard nightmares from other developers about 
the speed problems with the NeXT. I would actually just go out and get a Apple
drive (not a ton different in price) and thus you have the speed and you can use
it on macs if you have them (we do, so we need to have that ability).
 
From: James Cooper <jcooper@apple.com>
 
I recently used the original Apple CD-ROM drive to install NS3.0 PR2, so it
must also be compatible.  I don't have any particular information on
performance, though.  I know I wouldn't want to boot the system from CD (the
times long ago when I had only an optical drive for a few weeks were enough
of a nightmare.  My opinion of CD-ROM drives is that they're all far too slow
to be used for anything except copying stuff fron a CD onto a hard disk.  I
say that having been forced by lack of hard disk space to actually use one
occasionally for reading text files on a Mac.  So...get the cheapest one that
works.
                                                                                
From: Monty Solomon <monty@proponent.com>
 
I am not familiar with the performance of the NeXT CD-ROM drive.
The Apple CD-ROM drive that I have is the original drive and it has been 
replaced by a new one with a better mechanism.
 
From: barry@ictv.com (Barry Lustig)
 
We purchase our Sun CD-ROM drive with a catalyst (Sun developer) discount.   
I don't remember how much we paid for it, but it was fairly cheap for the  
time ($800 or so).