VOGONS


~1993 CD-R drive

Topic actions

First post, by xplus93

User metadata
Rank Oldbie
Rank
Oldbie

I plan on putting a CD-R drive in my 486-DX2 system just because. So far the only model from the time period that I could find is the HP 4020i. I really like the caddy-loaders and am looking at a sony CDU-928E right now, but it's a 97 model. Anybody know of and internal CD-R drive from around 93 preferably a caddy type.

XPS 466V|486-DX2|64MB|#9 GXE 1MB|SB32 PnP
Presario 4814|PMMX-233|128MB|Trio64
XPS R450|PII-450|384MB|TNT2 Pro| TB Montego
XPS B1000r|PIII-1GHz|512MB|GF2 PRO 64MB|SB Live!
XPS Gen2|P4 EE 3.4|2GB|GF 6800 GT OC|Audigy 2

Reply 3 of 42, by gdjacobs

User metadata
Rank l33t++
Rank
l33t++

I think they were fairly robust, but yes, tray load drives were much more convenient and quickly took over the market.

All hail the Great Capacitor Brand Finder

Reply 4 of 42, by creepingnet

User metadata
Rank Oldbie
Rank
Oldbie

If you even find a 24 year old CD-R burner, which are like hen's teeth, It will most likeley be SCSI, difficult to find drivers that work with it as most of the CD burners in the early 90's were deployed in large tower cases housing between 4 to 12 of them - I go to RE-PC in Tukwila and Seattle and always get pissed off when I see some 1993 era CD copier that looks like a really neato AT desktop tower in it's UV soaked golden beigey color. They are all SCSI devices.

Best bet IMHO is to do what I did and just slap in a regular 52X ATAPI CD-RW Drive, I have plans to install Nero on this thing anyway in Win95, and I already have CDROAST for DOS. I'm also toying with maybe getting a DVD-RW drive....just because I can 🤣

~The Creeping Network~
My Youtube Channel - https://www.youtube.com/creepingnet
Creepingnet's World - https://creepingnet.neocities.org/
The Creeping Network Repo - https://www.geocities.ws/creepingnet2019/

Reply 5 of 42, by oerk

User metadata
Rank Oldbie
Rank
Oldbie

CD-R drives weren't common AT ALL in 1993. IIRC, costing in the region of $10,000. So if you find one at all, even a model that's a few years younger, it would be more period correct in an external SCSI enclosure. Internal was pretty much unheard of.

Reply 7 of 42, by yawetaG

User metadata
Rank Oldbie
Rank
Oldbie

Plextor continued making caddy drives for pretty long, but AFAIK they're all SCSI. CD-R drives only started to become common by the end of the 1990s. What you could do is to look for a CD duplication system. These were dedicated units manufactured for industry that contained one regular CD drive and several burners with which a company could duplicate a single master CD onto several CD-R's at once, usually in a tower case that contained an actual PC system. That would be period-correct.

Reply 8 of 42, by xplus93

User metadata
Rank Oldbie
Rank
Oldbie

LMAO. What's really funny is that the drive that's in there right now is a really nice pioneer that came out of a DVD-RW duplication system, which as said, is the shittiest, beige-ist drive I have.

I've already accepted that SCSI will most likely be the interface i'll have to use, but does anybody know of specific models. I'm trying to put together what would have been the best system hands down that held out tooth and nail with as many period correct upgrades that could be thrown at it.

I'm probably gonna go the sony route, but I would really prefer something a bit more early 90s.

XPS 466V|486-DX2|64MB|#9 GXE 1MB|SB32 PnP
Presario 4814|PMMX-233|128MB|Trio64
XPS R450|PII-450|384MB|TNT2 Pro| TB Montego
XPS B1000r|PIII-1GHz|512MB|GF2 PRO 64MB|SB Live!
XPS Gen2|P4 EE 3.4|2GB|GF 6800 GT OC|Audigy 2

Reply 10 of 42, by xplus93

User metadata
Rank Oldbie
Rank
Oldbie

Same here, but it's all in prioritization. I'm a broke a** college student, but I know this is something I will want as a lifetime purchase so i'm putting the money in while it's only moderately expensive. Buy a representative system for each generation now and take care of it and i won't have to pay half a million like people pay for apple 1 systems now. Plus, i'm below poverty level and uncle sam was nice this year.

*damn, now i've given away the secret*, 🤣

XPS 466V|486-DX2|64MB|#9 GXE 1MB|SB32 PnP
Presario 4814|PMMX-233|128MB|Trio64
XPS R450|PII-450|384MB|TNT2 Pro| TB Montego
XPS B1000r|PIII-1GHz|512MB|GF2 PRO 64MB|SB Live!
XPS Gen2|P4 EE 3.4|2GB|GF 6800 GT OC|Audigy 2

Reply 11 of 42, by peklop

User metadata
Rank Member
Rank
Member

Yamaha CDR-100 and cheaper CDR-102 were one of first internal CD-R drives from DX2 era.

8669_2b9e5e4fbd.jpg

Last edited by peklop on 2017-02-16, 18:20. Edited 1 time in total.

Reply 12 of 42, by xplus93

User metadata
Rank Oldbie
Rank
Oldbie

Yeah! That's exactly what i'm looking for. Especially with all of that exposed non-integrated discrete circuitry and the superfluous indicator LEDs.

XPS 466V|486-DX2|64MB|#9 GXE 1MB|SB32 PnP
Presario 4814|PMMX-233|128MB|Trio64
XPS R450|PII-450|384MB|TNT2 Pro| TB Montego
XPS B1000r|PIII-1GHz|512MB|GF2 PRO 64MB|SB Live!
XPS Gen2|P4 EE 3.4|2GB|GF 6800 GT OC|Audigy 2

Reply 13 of 42, by Jo22

User metadata
Rank l33t++
Rank
l33t++

Uhm, how good is compatibility with recent media ?
I already had trouble with CD-R media at the turn of the century.
Can't remember how many times I had to repeat writing a CD until I succeded.
I remember that some programs like Nero Burning ROM even had a "simulation" feature.
And boy, was I happy when I finally got a more advanced CD writer! No more buffer-underruns!

"Time, it seems, doesn't flow. For some it's fast, for some it's slow.
In what to one race is no time at all, another race can rise and fall..." - The Minstrel

//My video channel//

Reply 14 of 42, by Malvineous

User metadata
Rank Oldbie
Rank
Oldbie

Why all the dislike of SCSI? It was standardised long before ATAPI so the reader part of the CD will work with generic SCSI CD drivers available for all OSes, and while the writer bit might be proprietary that early on, any software from that era will support it much better than ATAPI because that's all that was available at the time. I think you'd have more trouble using period-correct software from 1993 with an ATAPI drive, really.

There are also plenty of ISA SCSI cards around - I just picked up a VLB SCSI-2 card for my 486 for US$16+shipping which I was pretty pleased with.

Having actually bought a brand new Matsushita CW-7502 CD-R back in 1998 (justifying the AU$700 price tag - equivalent to €820 / US$872 in 2017 money - with what I lost after a recent hard drive crash), even then SCSI was the only real option. It even came in a bundle with an Advansys ISA SCSI card.

Despite all the talk of "voodoo" around SCSI, I've always found it much easier to work with. IDE has given me no end of trouble, especially if I'm using early ISA adapters, or devices that work only as a standalone master and break when there's a slave on the same cable, or don't work properly in slave mode, or work with everything except the one device I want it to share a cable with, the list goes on. But SCSI - as long as you have the bus terminated properly, I can't even recall a single issue I've had over the years.

As for availability, I'm thinking about this one, a SCSI Sony caddy CD-R from 1996 for AU$30 + shipping. I have plenty of SCSI drives and burners though so as fun as the caddy would be, I may have to let it go...

Reply 16 of 42, by xplus93

User metadata
Rank Oldbie
Rank
Oldbie

Yeah, but USB wasn't too cheap to implement either and was way more troublesome from the start. It's a real shame the IBM-compatible world din't pick it up as much. Just pop anything on the bus load up some standard drivers and away you go. To this day I have a nightmare with USB peripherals, although most of that is due to how windows handles them and not the actual specification. IMO the only reason USB succeeded was that nobody pushed SCSI far enough into the market to bring prices down and people started to get desperate.

XPS 466V|486-DX2|64MB|#9 GXE 1MB|SB32 PnP
Presario 4814|PMMX-233|128MB|Trio64
XPS R450|PII-450|384MB|TNT2 Pro| TB Montego
XPS B1000r|PIII-1GHz|512MB|GF2 PRO 64MB|SB Live!
XPS Gen2|P4 EE 3.4|2GB|GF 6800 GT OC|Audigy 2

Reply 17 of 42, by Jorpho

User metadata
Rank l33t++
Rank
l33t++
xplus93 wrote:

Buy a representative system for each generation now and take care of it

Your expensive purchase will sit in a corner and collect dust while you either play games on a more usable machine, or fritter away your hours building more systems you will never use. Just sayin'.

Reply 18 of 42, by xplus93

User metadata
Rank Oldbie
Rank
Oldbie
Jorpho wrote:
xplus93 wrote:

Buy a representative system for each generation now and take care of it

Your expensive purchase will sit in a corner and collect dust while you either play games on a more usable machine, or fritter away your hours building more systems you will never use. Just sayin'.

Worst case scenario I use the machine for 8-10 hours per YEAR for the rest of my life. Honestly though I could have a weekend of fun destroying the OS on purpose and doing a full restore from floppies, so I really don't see a poor return on my investment. In fact I did just that recently when I added CD-ROM to my 486 system and went crazy with my autoexec.bat Ended up making a new completely messed up one and deleting the backup because I thought it was the new version, 🤣. Anyways, I agree that the 13-18 group that's getting into it now supports your view, but that's not me. It's just way too much fun working with systems I actually understand and grew up with unlike the crap now which is returning to the 60s/70s mainframe/terminal concept.

XPS 466V|486-DX2|64MB|#9 GXE 1MB|SB32 PnP
Presario 4814|PMMX-233|128MB|Trio64
XPS R450|PII-450|384MB|TNT2 Pro| TB Montego
XPS B1000r|PIII-1GHz|512MB|GF2 PRO 64MB|SB Live!
XPS Gen2|P4 EE 3.4|2GB|GF 6800 GT OC|Audigy 2

Reply 19 of 42, by Ampera

User metadata
Rank Oldbie
Rank
Oldbie
Jorpho wrote:
xplus93 wrote:

Buy a representative system for each generation now and take care of it

Your expensive purchase will sit in a corner and collect dust while you either play games on a more usable machine, or fritter away your hours building more systems you will never use. Just sayin'.

No, don't question that, the moment you start thinking like this, the moment the entirety of our retro collecting falls apart.