They are quite common so the first place I'd look would be local auction sites.
Ebay is super overpriced. I just bought a 8x Goldstar writer for ¢50 and a 2X CD-ROM with ISA controller for $5. Just look at Ebay prices and you'll see what I mean. Every country have their own auction sites.

Miphee wrote:

They are quite common so the first place I'd look would be local auction sites.
Ebay is super overpriced. I just bought a 8x Goldstar writer for ¢50 and a 2X CD-ROM with ISA controller for $5. Just look at Ebay prices and you'll see what I mean. Every country have their own auction sites.

Oh yeah, I'm very aware eBay is often overpriced. Just to clearify: I'm not looking for places where to find these.. I'm looking for brands and types that would fit in the category I described, so I know what to look for. That Goldstar Writer you mentioned, for instance: what type is that?

I actually remember that my first CD writer was the HP 7200i.

Not sure on model numbers but Ricoh were big back then releasing the first RW drive back in 97, but thats SCSI
https://www.zdnet.com/article/five-years-ago- … rst-cd-rw-drive

Creative seemed to be around 2000
http://ixbtlabs.com/articles/cdrw3/cdrw-test2 … vecrw8432e.html
http://ixbtlabs.com/articles/cdrw6/cdrw-test2 … erw121032e.html

Bonus! found a mag from '98!

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Mptk_eahf … BAB#v=onepage&q

I had a Yamaha 6x4x16 SCSI burner in 1999. I can't recall if they had ATAPI models, but worth looking into.

edit: The answer is yes:

CRW4416E, and CRW6416E. I assume they were released at the same time as the more popular SCSI models.

edit 2: the CRW4416E was actually manufacturered in late 1998.

I think most writers from that time period were SCSI, I'd be interested in this too, I can check if I have any.

I owned a Yamaha CRW422 back in 1997. But you need to understand that CD recorders were not very common back then. They were expensive, mostly SCSI, and hardly seen in an ordinary PC at that time. Also, 1999 was already Pentium III era if you go that far.

they were also slow, probably 2x or something max for a fast one and incompatible with reading various media.

You could always find a broken drive and just swap the faceplate onto a newer drive if you want the period correct look.

Period correct optical drives that actually work properly is generally going to be a bit difficult.

I have a few readers from back then that work, but writers usually wear out the laser a lot faster. Even newer optical drives have issues with the lasers dying pretty quickly.

I liked

Plextor
Yamaha
Sony
HP

The Plextor run smooth and quiet.
The HP is known to break.

Stretch wrote:

I actually remember that my first CD writer was the HP 7200i.

I think that was mine as well. 2x2x6 sounds right, and the faceplate looks familiar. It's been a while though. I think it died at some point, and only wrote TAO mode anyway. I ended up buying a friend's later 4x version with a darker gray faceplate and a swoosh mark across the front. Don't remember the exact model.

From there, my next burner was a Plextor 12/10/32S, that they also made in IDE (12/10/32A), and then a PlexCombo DVD/CDRW (320A), and then a DVD-R/RAM by either Pioneer or Panasonic, I don't remember which -- but that's definitely well into the 2000s.

chinny22 wrote:

Not sure on model numbers but Ricoh were big back then releasing the first RW drive back in 97, but thats SCSI

First CD-R I used was a Ricoh connected to a Mac. Never did get a successful burn. Which hurt, at $10 a disc.

chinny22 wrote:

Bonus! found a mag from '98!

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Mptk_eahf … BAB#v=onepage&q

Woah, totally forgot about Fart & Smiendly! That's a name I haven't heard in a while.

One thing that sucks about the Yamaha burners is that they have these tiny little fans that are prone to filling up with dust and stopping. Once that happens, your drive will bake itself to death. I'm pretty sure that's how mine passed away. It worked beautifully while it was healthy though.
If you're going to go with an early ATAPI burner, it sounds like Plextor might be the only one that doesn't make piles of coasters.

1999 was using a Plextor SCSI. Still have a PX-R412Ci from Jan 1998 (man. date) that works, uses those odd caddies to put the CDR in. Good luck on finding a CDR from 1999 that still burns after all this time.
(added) Too bad your not thinking SCSI because you may have great luck getting a good 1999 burner. I have a Teac CD-R58S NOS (Sept. 1999 man. date) that I picked up about 10 years ago for like $10, never used except tested and put away. 🤣

Here in the US, back in mid 1998, i remember paying $500 retail for a 4x burn/8x read ide CDR drive from a store called comp-usa, i dont remember the brand unfortunately, i used it for like 2weeks trying it out, worked great, but couldnt justify keeping it for that price, so i returned it.

I currently own a Mitsumi 4x4x24 cdrw(cr 4804te) i purchased brand new back in late 1999, manufacturer date of AUG 1999, used it for a good year or two, then packed it away when i upgraded to a newer and faster drive, an HP 9710i 16x10x40 cdrw(every type of cd continuously vibrated like crazy when reading/writing/etc, used it only for a few days, then boxed it back up meaning to return it, but forgot about it, so it sits basically brand new in its retail box to this day), all i have left is the drive(mitsumi), all the retail stuff is long gone, it was working perfectly when put away,not sure about now, and pretty much still sitting sealed up looking like new to this day for about 19yrs now.

Never mind, the Goldstar I mentioned is not a writer. I was wrong.
The oldest writer I have is this, a 8X Sony CRX140E but it's not from the '90s.

Thanks for all the great responses so far. I've been doing some more research into this and it seems that anything before 1998 is very likely to be SCSI. IDE would of course take a lot more processing power from your pc than SCSI, so I guess that makes sense for burning CDs.

I have thought about the SCSI option but there are a few drawbacks. My system has no more free PCI slots, so it has to be an 16 bit ISA card.. they might be hard to find (for a reasonable price) and secondly, the system is filled with cards and I've put in an effort to make it all work in DOS and WIN95 without any driver or I/O conflicts. I don't have much experience with SCSI controllers, so I'm not sure what potentional problems that's going to cause. IDE would be so much easier to work with.

Maybe someone with more SCSI knowledge can enlighten me. Does a SCSI controller card use an additional IRQ channel? Is it likely to work in DOS? I've also seen a SCSI to IDE convertor, which was just a small pcb with the different connector types on it. Would that be enough to get it working with IDE? Somehow seems unlikely to me, if you normally need a seperate controller card.

And the concern about it still working is an issue too, of course. While searching I found a bunch of old forum threads about CD writers breaking down within months.. some brands and types named more often than others. But yeah, it's always a bit of a gamble when you deal with old computer parts, so if it's not too pricey I'm willing to take a risk.

Anyway, thanks so far and keep those suggestions coming! 😀

Yes a SCSI controller will indeed eat up a IRQ, but they'll work fine in DOS AFAIK.

I do have a Adaptec AHA-2940U2W in one of my systems, I don't recall having to load a driver for it, though for a CD you'll have to load a driver for the CD drive (there are a lot of CD drivers, so I can't recommand you one over the others) and a ASPI (Advanced SCSI Programming Interface) driver (depending on your card).

There are some SCSI cards with their BIOS (which are bootable, provided you attach a bootable hard drive to them), and others that lack a boot ROM (these on the other hand are good enough if you just need to connect a CD drive).

Personally, I've always went with Adaptec SCSI cards and so far never had any issue with them. But there are other brands of SCSI cards.

You are correct, SCSI CD burners used a lot less CPU than IDE burners of the late 90s, so they were less prone to make coasters. I had an HP CD-Writer Plus 9110i at work in 1999 and its success rate burning discs wasn't much higher than 50% in the 366 MHz Pentium II that I had. The Sony SCSI drive that I had at home was much more reliable (working over 90% of the time) even though all I had was a Pentium-233. I don't know anymore if that HP drive was the first IDE CD-R or not, but early IDE burners weren't great, especially in older systems.

The first IDE drive that I remember people actually buying and liking was that Plextor model. A number of other companies resold that drive, including Creative and Iomega, and they used a similar model number to Plextor. Creative sold an 8432 model based on the Plextor, and the Iomega equivalent was called the Zip CD 8432. I'm pretty sure those drives came out in 2000 though.

In those days getting a drive to work and burn discs reliably was a bit of a black art and people would argue over "proper" setups. Generally most people agreed to put the drive on the second IDE channel, alone. But if you didn't shut down all your programs, disable your screensaver and antivirus, and possibly even unplug from the network and flip your mouse over, some people would say you were being sloppy and deserved what you got. But in all fairness, some drives were better than others and the speed of your CPU and the brand of discs you used mattered. Kodak was the best of the big-name brands you could buy at retail. There were a couple of Japanese brands that were better, but you couldn't buy those at retail and my purchasing department at work couldn't buy either of them from their usual sources.

I never had a SCSI CD-RW drive, my first CD-recorder was an HP which could record CD-Rs at 6x and CD-RWs at 2x. Its max read speed was 24x, IIRC. My father bought it for me as a gift in early 2000. I used it in my Celeron 333A (overclocked to 500 MHz) with great results.

It was an excellent quiet drive that served me well (I recorded literally thousands of disks with it) and was still working perfectly when I gave that PC away in 2005.