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PREFACE:
The Compact Disk (CD) media can store data and music files and short
videos. These disks can be written with a CD writer. Most CD drives
today can both read and write CDs. There are two types of CD media.
CD-R or CD-Recordable media can be written to once. That is to say, once the
media is written to or burned, it cannot be reused. However, you can make
multi-session disks. A mulit-session CD-R is one that has had some data
written to it once and then some more again and so on. But every session
requires 10MB of read in and read out tracks. So to write just 1 small
text file say 1kb, you actually consume 10MB of the CD-R's capacity which is
approximately 700MB. CD-RW or CD-ReWrite media can be rewritten many
times. That is to say that you can burn a file then reburn another file
over the same area of the disk. But this has it's limitations as well.
CD-RW has a finite number of times that it can be rewritten. There are
other drawbacks of CD-RW as well.
Well, you can now buy 100X speed CD-ROMs. Their actually speed is
more like 32X. These 100X drives use hard drive space as a cache.
The biggest problem with CDs is that some of the older CDs simply aren't balanced for
the higher speeds. An 8X speed seems to do just fine, but the 10X and higher
have problems with older CDs.
The lower the access time,
the better. Watch out for large CD-ROM cache numbers, higher on-drive RAM cache is not necessarily better, that just means the drive is
capable of more error correction, and if it has a large cash, it
probably means it needs it. WIN9X uses main memory for drive
caches for read ahead data anyhow.
INSTALLATION:
This is the same as an IDE or SCSI hard drive as you
can buy either SCSI or IDE CD drives.
A CD drive really does need an external 5.25" drive bay.
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