Product: HP SureStore CD-Writer Plus 7110e (external; a 7110i internal model was also produced; both are now discontinued).
Update: The HP 7110i and 7110e were available in U.S. and Canadian retail markets only and included the LivePix Photo Enhancer and Organizer software. Other than that, the 7110i and 7110e were identical to the 7100i and 7100e. These units have been replaced by the 7200 series.
From: Hewlett-Packard
Street Price: 7110e is about US$500; HP 7110i is US$449.
Pros: Writes CD-R and CD-RW discs. Parallel port for easy connection to any PC. (Actually, the 71x0e drive is an IDE device with a parallel port adapter by Shuttletech.) Hardware supports Disc at Once (DAO) and Track at Once (TAO) modes. Multiread compatible. In addition to being a 2X rewriter, the SureStore is also a 6x CD reader, although the limited lifespan of laser emitters makes a cheap CD-ROM drive a better (and usually faster) choice for day-to-day use.
Cons: No on/off switch on the drive. Incompatible with Hewlett-Packard ScanJet 5100C. (Does anyone else find this a little ironic?) DAO and TAO modes are not supported by the software that ships with the drive. However, a message on Usenet from Timothy Martin <tjmartin@anl.gov> clears up the confusion:
Says Martin, "Those users who are considering using the Philips V2.02 firmware on a HP7100/7110 CD-RW machine to enable DAO. Please note that the Adaptec Easy CD Creator software that is bundled with the drive does not support DAO. At least my ECDC V3.01 (257) did not support DAO. The V3.01a upgrade on the Adaptec web site for the HP7100 drives also does not support DAO. I purchased Adaptec Easy CD Creator Deluxe, typically about $89, and can only now do DAO."
The software supplied by HP has another notable limitation. If you want to make "true" ISO 9660 CDs (readable on virtually any kind of computer including PCs and Macs) for cross-platform distribution, the included software won't do it. Mastering software that supports these modes is, however, available from Adaptec (www.adaptec.com), Ahead (www.ahead.de) and other suppliers. Initially, we had some difficulty getting the drive working on our test system -- a problem eventually proved to be related to a previously installed version of CD Creator. Subsequent tests on other computers, however, suggest that most users won't have a problem. Note that most existing CD-ROM drives won't read the CD-RW discs this drive creates unless they are specified as "MultiRead compatible." Most older drives, including an 8X unit we purchased in 1997, aren't. CD-R discs created by the CD-Writer, however, worked in every drive we tried. A firmware update resolves this issue that, according to HP, "causes multi session CD-Rs created with the 7100 and 7200 products to be unreadable by a large majority of CD-ROM devices." It's at http://www.hp.com/isgsupport/cdr/70index.html
Do-it-yourself CD Recording
The HP SureStore CD-Writer Plus 71x0 series of drives allow you to write and rewrite discs playable in standard CD players. With the price of CD-R discs now under $2, this provides a very attractive cost-per megabyte when used as a backup medium. (We've seen CD-R disc prices as low as C$1.80 in 100-lot quantities.)
But the drive can be used for several other purposes, too. Bundled software includes Adaptec EZ AudioCD (essentially a subset of Adaptec's EZ CD Creator) for making audio CDs, DirectCD 2.0 and CD Copier, plus software to erase CDRW discs and a utility for designing jewel case artwork. A multimedia quick tour is also provided.
Direct CD is the application most SureStore owners will use when writing to a CD-R or CD-RW disc. It enables drive-letter access and allows you to write to the CD as if it were a giant floppy disk. There is a catch, however. DirectCD uses a special UDF disc format to add these capabilities and, at least currently, this makes the discs created by DirectCD compatible only with other Windows 95/NT systems, even after the disc is "closed" in a variant of the ISO 9660 format that allows the disc to be read on other Windows 95/NT systems. DirectCD's incremental writing has other drawbacks, too. It essentially disables all caching of the CD so that the system doesn't read ahead -- apparently, a requirement of the incremental writing process. This degrades the performance of your CD drive.
How DirectCD works
DirectCD writes incrementally to a CD using special UDF technology. You must format the disc before use -- a process that takes 50 to 90 minutes (yes, minutes!) in the case of the CD-RW discs. CD-R discs are, for some reason, a great deal faster to initialize, and will typically format in a few seconds. These discs can then be written to, via the DirectCD driver, as if they were a floppy disk from the Windows explorer, or any application, such as Microsoft Word. CD-R discs, unlike their Read/Write siblings, must be "closed" to be readable on other computers. This is handled via DirectCD's so-called "Eject Wizard" which makes the discs compatible with the ISO 9660 format of a standard CD by a fancy trick, in which the disc is rewritten with an ISO9660 "directory" partition that refers to the data on the UDF partition. makes the disc appear to Win95 or NT as if it were a standard ISO9660-formatted disc. Thus, the disc isn't a "true" ISO 9660 disc, although the distinction is largely irelevant for Windows 95 or NT users. What it does mean, however, is that Mac and Windows 3.1 users won't be able to read the discs.
If you need to produce discs readable on platforms other than Win95/NT, a package such as Easy CD Creator 3.0 (available for download directly from www.adaptec.com for US$99) or Nero 3.0 (US$69 from www.ahead.de) will do the trick. Either title can produce CDs that can be successfully read from Windows95, Windows NT 4.0, Windows 3.11, Windows NT 3.5.1, MS-DOS, Solaris, Mac, and Linux systems. As mentioned earlier, we had difficulty getting the SureStore drive to work initially because our system had the Easy CD drivers already installed and the installer didn't check for them. Only by hunting through the directories to the Resource folder did we find an uninstaller that noticed the problem and cleaned the system up for us. We had no problems with Nero and recommend it highly. It can write discs all at once, or in multiple sessions.
DAO Mode
Why would you want to write a whole disc at once? Simply put, because some CD-ROM duplication facilities don't accept track-at-once CD-R. If you are mastering a CD, DAO is the preferred method.
To use the DAO function, you must us a third-party package such as the latest version of Easy CD Pro 95 (2.11c or newer).
In our tests, the drive worked well under both Windows 95 and Windows NT 4.0. We were able to easily back up existing CD-ROMs to the SureStore on CD-R or CD-RW media, using the existing IDE CD-ROM drive on our PC as the source drive. (CD-R discs run about US$2 each; CD-RW discs cost about US$18.) In fact, we experienced very few of the dreaded buffer underrun errors that frequently plague CD-R users.
It's also worth mentioning that using a CD-RW drive is a good way to get the hang of CD disc recording. If it fails, you can simply erase the CD-RW media and try again. On a standard CD-R drive, failures are much more frustrating and expensive, as the "blown" discs cannot be recorded again. It's also worthg mentioning that we blew several discs using DirectCD and Easy CD, but did not experience a single failure using Nero.
Results were not as good when recording audio CDs using the bundled EasyCD Audio software. Titles such as GEAR Audio 4.2 truncate the last two seconds of audio of each track. (Believe me, this plays hell with the flow-together songs on a prog-rock opus, although you can use an extra-cost software package such as Easy CD Pro to manually assemble a disc a track at a time-- hardly ideal!)
Some users also report another problem: audio discs written with more than 10 tracks of audio combine the remaining tracks as one long song. Thus, if recording audio CDs is your primary application of a CD Recorder, you might want to go with a top-rated SCSI-II based drive instead of an ATAPI or parallel-interfaced model. It's also worth mentioning that none of the audio extraction programs we tried (CDPLAYER, CDCOPY, CDDA32, etc.) worked correctly with the 7110 (it's an ATAPI drive; the programs expect SCSI). We finally found success with WinDAC32. It is available at http://members.aol.com/schmelnik/dac.html.
After numerous tests, we believe that Ahead's Nero 3.021 (US$69) is the most reliable CD recording software. It works well with the 7110e (it detects the drive as an HP 7100). Recommended.
Glossary:
DAO = Disc at Once, a mode of operation in which the whole disc is written at once. DAO reproduces the data format of a CD much more accurately than using TAO mode.
TAO = Track at Once.
Multiread = CDRW drives necessitated changes to the firmware and hardware of standard CD-ROM players to be able to handle the differences in reflectivity, defect management and so-called random block retrieval required by the new "write-many" process. Such drives are said to be Multiread compatible. In other words, older CD-ROM drives that are not Multiread compatible may not be able to read CD-RW discs.
For Further Reading:
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