I promised to write up my experiences with this, so here goes: To start with, I used Windoze 98.2 on an Athlon (650, I think). My previous burner was a Plextor scsi; this one is ide. I have two ide hard disks; they were both "only" on the two chains.
I opened the computer, and tried putting the plextor drive in (playing with jumpers as appropriate). It wouldn't boot. In fact, it didn't even know there were disks. After several days of fiddling, I found that I'd managed to bend one of the pins on C:. I very carefully bent it back, and now everything works. I have both disks on one chain, and the Plextor on the other. As for speed, it's often quite fast. However: (1) The maximum burn speed for audio is 24x, not 40x, so it isn't any faster than the 24/12/40 for audio. (2) While it can burn at up to 40x for data, when burning a data disk by far the largest amounts of time are for creating the .iso file, and verifying the burn. The actual burn time isn't much. (3) Even for audio, the lead-in and closeout times don't seem any (or at least, not much) shorter than with my previous 12x drive. (4) Sometimes it seems to burn much more slowly than the rated speed. I don't know why this happened; it just happened on one of two Sony CDs I was doing for a b&p, for instance. On the whole, I'd say there's no reason not to get it, but if cost is very important, the value point is 24/12/40. Because the majority of time isn't in the burning, I don't see any reason to go for an even faster speed (unless the lead-in and closeout times are also decreased; but even then, burning isn't slow enough to bother me any more). Seth _______________________________________________ etree.org etree mailing list <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://mail.etree.org/mailman/listinfo/etree Need help? Ask <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
