Category: Storage & Memory
More Mass Storage Solutions
A Technology Report on the latest high-capacity drives
See also Part 1 of this article: massstorage.html
(For information on CD Recordable Drives, see the article on CD-R.)
SparQ: not for Mac
The SyQuest SparQ is a 1 Gigabyte removable media drive for a little more than the price of a Zip. One of the SparQ's best...
IDE Troubleshooting
Q: I am the owner of a Pentium PC and a 16x CD-ROM drive. As with most such drives, it is capable of playing Audio CDs or CDs with programs or data on them. However, within the last few days the CD has stopped reading program/data CD's. When trying to view them with the file manager, it says the CD's are not in the reader...
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...
Product: Encore Dxr2 DVD kit
From: Creative Labs
Price: about C$375
Strongest Competitors:
Pacific Digital
Hitachi
Toshiba
Diamond Multimedia (Toshiba mechanism)
Sony 5x drive
When we installed a Creative Labs Encore Dxr2 DVD kit, we were delighted to see that the DVD drive is recognized by Windows 98's boot floppy as a standard IDE device,...
Section one of this feature discusses the Creative Labs Encore DVD drive; section 2 discusses software utilities and drivers that add UDF support to your computer's operating system.
Product: Encore Dxr2 DVD kit
From: Creative Labs
Price: about C$375
Strongest Competitors:
Pacific Digital
Hitachi
Toshiba
Diamond Multimedia (Toshiba mechanism)...
You need only look at the selection of removable media in any computer supply store to know that Recordable and rewritable Compact discs are the most popular form of mass storage. It's not hard to see why. Compared to the 10 cents or so a megabyte of storage costs on a Zip, Jaz or most other removable storage media devices, the cost per meg on a...
When you are using a CD-recordable drive, CDRW (CD rewritable) or a new DVD drive, you may be working with an underlying techonology called UDF -- an acronym for the optimistically named "universal disk format." A description of CDRW, the differences between first- and second generation DVD is in an article on our website entitled...
The reward for the extra effort required to install the
EIDE version is substantially higher performance.
Product: SyQuest SparQ
For: Windows 3.1 or higher, Windows 95/98, Windows NT 4.0 (an iMac version was due in Nov. 98, but did not appear due to the fact that SyQuest entered bankruptcy in Nov. '98. See the bottom of this file for additional...
Product: SyQuest SparQ (parallel version; an EIDE version is also available. A USB version was in development, but may not appear due to the fact that the company entered bankruptcy in Nov. '98. See the bottom of this article for additional details.)
For: Windows 3.1 or higher, Windows 95/98, Windows NT 4.0
Price: C$299 (EIDE version also...
There's no doubt about it -- television and video are powerful forces in our society, and as prices fall and high-capacity storage systems make digital video capture and editing systems more widely available, it is likely that in-house "video sampling" will soon be a common task for tomorrow's media-savvy students, marketers and...
Based on a Sony CRW9420 drive, this package includes a great bundle
of software to handle virtually any backup task.
Product: 4x4x20x CD-ReWriter
From: AOpen (www.aopen.com.tw)
Price: TBD
Pros: Fast, easy to install. Great software bundle in retail pack, which also includes all cables and screws necessary for installation. Includes blank CD-R and...
GigaMO
GIGAMO is a the name of a new high-capacity removable storage format co-developed by Fujitsu and Sony. It uses a technology called MSR (magnetically induced super resolution) to store up to 1.3 gigabytes on a disc similar to those used in previous generations of 3.5" MO drives. In fact, the drive is read/write backward-compatible with...
Burn a CD-R disc in under 9 minutes with LaCie's CRD-R800S 8x20x CD-R drive
Product: 8x20x (external SCSI drive based on a Sanyo CRD-R800S mechanism)
From: LaCie (www.lacie.com)
Price: US$449 (street); includes Adaptec CD-R software for Windows and Macintosh.
Pros: Good software. Excellent performance (we burned a 650MB disc in about 9...
It's worse than you think. And they want to increase it.
"The law specifically states that any qualifying medium that is sold by an importer
or manufacturer... will be subject to the levy."
Prices aren't expected to continue dropping in the CD-recordable media department. In fact, Bill C32, instituted Jan. 1, 1999 (but subsequently...
"The law specifically states that any qualifying medium that is sold by an importer
or manufacturer... will be subject to the levy."
Bill C32, originally planned to take effect Jan. 1, 1999, was delayed, but still resulted in Canadians paying higher prices on several categories of recorded media and, as of Dec. 12, 2003, portable audio...