They say 24x drive + performance enhancing software 😀

But aparently 72x was a thing...

https://youtu.be/QNY4DFhf6xM

Ha, nice false advertising.

From what I remember those 72X drives didn't actually spin at 72X, they just had many read heads.

Yeah.. that 100x thing is a scam. The Pioneer 72x drive was ok.. if you could get one that actually worked and didn't die within a few months... yay for multiple lasers to buffer data.

They were quiet but very unreliable.

I have a Kenwood 72x. It works, but there are many, many caveats. The firmware sucks. The drivers suck. It only works in 9x. It has a nasty tendency to uninstall itself/corrupt the driver. And, last but definitely not least, it only reads 72x on NON COPY PROTECTED, pressed CDs, and perhaps needless to say, it only reaches 72x on the outermost track.

It's too bad they never adapted the technology to DVDs and worked out the bugs.

Yes, these really existed. I actually was naive enough to purchase one in early 1998, when I was looking to replace my IBM Aptiva's 4X CD-ROM drive. I found this at my local Office Depot, and I it was priced between $150-$200, if I recall correctly. I originally had my sights set on Creative Labs' new 32X CD-ROM drive, which I clearly should have purchased instead.

The box contained a CD-ROM drive with a "Smart 100X" label printed on the drive door (this was really a 24X drive), a Win95 driver disk, manual, and a Yamaha wavetable sound card. The sound card was probably included as consolation for being ripped off.

In short, this could theoretically achieve "100X" speeds, but there was a huge catch. This used a specific 32-bit CD-ROM driver that would copy a portion of the CD-ROM's contents to the hard drive. The CD-ROM "seeks" would come from the hard drive, and not the CD-ROM.

In early 1998, the newest consumer-grade PCs were shipping with the Intel Pentium II at 333 MHz . PCs with 100 MHz front side bus Pentium II processors (350/400/450 MHz) didn't ship until later in 1998. The IDE hard drive interface on PCs from early 1998 were improved, allowing for a theoretical maximum data transfer rate increase from 16.6 Mbps to 33.3 Mbps. If we do some basic math, a 1X CD-ROM is capable of about 150 kilobytes/second, so 100 times that is about 15 Mbps. The newer 33 Mbps interface was supposed to guarantee that we'd see those speeds...but I doubt such speeds were actually achieved. Also, a 650-700 MB CD-ROM image would consume a huge amount of the typical 3.1 to 4.3 GB hard drive of the time. If you had an 8 GB drive, which would have been monstrously expensive in early 1998, this may have worked; however, it took forever to transfer the CD-ROM data to the hard disk. I thought the included driver/software allowed the user to limit the hard disk buffer size, but I can't remember.

My problem was that my system (an IBM Aptiva 2168-M series tower) had a Quantum Fireball 1080AT disk (1.0 GB) with an IDE interface from 1995, which wasn't capable of 33.3 Mbps. As you might have guessed, copying CD-ROM contents to a disk with less than 400 MB of free space was not going to happen. But I was 17 at the time, and unfortunately, this was one of life's many lessons to be learned: read the box before getting too excited.

Some new old stock (NOS) exists here. I'm not sure if this is legit, but it has some really good high-res photos: https://www.shopzonjumper.store/product/Nos-D … uzyxrurruv.html.

This would make an interesting LGR oddware video 😀

I still have the Yamaha sound card, and it's actually quite good for MS-DOS retro gaming. It's got an OPL3-SA3 FM synthesis chip, and has a decent software wavetable. FM synthesized music sounds beautiful, as one would expect from a Yamaha product. This does have the wave blaster header, so adding a DreamBlaster X2 or similar MIDI device would probably work very well, though I have not tested this.

My "Smart 100X" 24X CD-ROM drive broke about 20 years ago, but somehow I managed to keep the floppy disk containing the driver. I kept my Aptiva's original 4X CD-ROM, and it still works after 27 years.

So what kind of crappy 24X drive was it under all the marketing hype? $150-$200 seemed a bit much. I remember in 1997 prices of CD-ROM drives dropped a lot, so for that price you should have been able to get something nice like a Matsushita, Pioneeer, Toshiba or Plextor (probably bundled with a SCSI interface card too).
The Creative drive probably also would have been craptacular. They also had a thing for blinging up sub-par CD-ROM drives.
The correct answer would have been to save the money and put it towards a CD-RW drive.

On a semi-related note, I wanted an external Blu Ray drive for occasional use, so I recently got an LG WH14NS40 and an enclosure.

For kicks, I tried ripping audio CDs (with C2 data) using DBPoweramp (gotta love Accuraterip checksum validation) as part of my ongoing archival efforts.

I was surprised when I saw speeds of over 38x at some ( disks usually start at 18x-ish) while hearing practically no sound coming from the drive ! 40x CD-DA (DAE) in CAV mode is supported according to spec sheet, so no real surprise there, but the lack of noise and vibration really shocked me. I have to try some data CDs at some point (48x CAV is supported).

I can't help but try to imagine how much faster CD reading tech could actually be made to go based on how this drive makes its relatively high rated speed look (and sound) so effortless.

If it wasn't for the lack of CD audio analogue out, I would be tempted to convert one of these to IDE (it is natively SATA, obviously ) and try it in a retro PC. On second thought, I might still try to add one as a second optical drive.

For the record, I have lots of drives (CD , DVD, BD), both readers and writers of recent (last 1 to 5 years)and relatively ancient (IDE 8x and 10x ) vintage (and everything in between), and I'm impressed. Admittedly, I don't usually use Blu Ray drives to rip audio CDs, but this drive has proven so fast and capable (haven't seen a single read retry in maybe 30 thrift store audio CDs from the 90s), that I'm reconsidering using that drive exclusively.

Beware that the WH14NS40 was produced in two versions, NS40 and NS50, that use different firmwares.

More confusion: This drive is also known as as BH14NS40. (It's just the retail release of the OEM WH14NS40)

Errius wrote on 2023-01-09, 23:02:

Beware that the WH14NS40 was produced in two versions, NS40 and NS50, that use different firmwares.

More confusion: This drive is also known as as BH14NS40. (It's just the retail release of the OEM WH14NS40)

Thank you.

For reference, mine is an OEM variant NS50 running latest firmware 1.05 (from factory). Label says it was manufactured in August 2022.