Trading is not allowed on Vogons.
Try Amibay or eBay.

I got a couple of NOS Creative IDE drives from the mid-1990s some time ago, and was well pleased. I installed them in my two main computers, except that they both failed after just one or two years of use. Are Creative drives just not very durable?

I remember Creative optical drives being unreliable.

Personally, I prefer to use newer optical drives (say, at least 2006) because of quietness, speed and reliability. The only thing I don't like is it's nearly impossible to find a newer IDE optical drive with a beige face. Sometimes I make that compromise (black face in beige case), though it's not ideal. I'm a function over form kinda guy.

Errius wrote:

I got a couple of NOS Creative IDE drives from the mid-1990s some time ago, and was well pleased. I installed them in my two main computers, except that they both failed after just one or two years of use. Are Creative drives just not very durable?

Creative optical drives are usually rebadges of other firms'. The earlier ones were mostly Matsushita/Panasonic, and the later ones (past 32X speed) were apparently from BTC. Supposedly the BTC ones have reliability problems.

One can usually tell the OEM by checking the label or the "style" of the front panel. Matsushita drives all tend to share the same design of front panel, for example, which Creative simply added its logos to.

Sorry for the late reply, all.. Wasn't actually looking to trade (or at least in the sense of making a profit here). Just having spare ones lying around now which too me is a bit of a waste, knowing that there'll be folk here to be found that would be happy to get replacement ones. I've actually did put them on an eBay site too, but that's an entirely different kind of crowd.

They're beige by the way. 😉

But I'll happily post them onto AmiBay, just wanted to 'measure' the interest here first and wasn't sure if I was allowed to post it or not. Like I said, not looking to make a profit.

Personally I think I like the SAMSUNG ones from this batch the best. Nice and sturdy built, reliable and not at all that noisy.

I'll head over to AmiBay now and make the same announcement. Perhaps will see you there.

PS. I'm not getting proper notifications to PM's or changes to threads, not sure why... so if I respond a little slow, it's because I don't visit the site on a very regular basis (just as time permits).

They are all 48x speed drives, correct? In this case, they are completely useless for retro PCs. If the system can not handle the constant 7.2 mb/sec. coming from the drive, the disc will spin up and down continually, which will kill the drive quite fast and give performance way behind a native 4x or 8x drive.

ps: you can not sell them here either, no matter if you make profit or not.

That's an interesting perspective. I've never had a problem with a fast CD-ROM drive dying on me due to continually spinning up an down. I guess it also depends on the brand/model.
How are they useless for retro PC's? I mean, Windows game PC's can be considered retro too and that's the era from which these drives are (2000-2002). Even old DOS machines will handle 7.2 MB/sec throughput just fine.

Anyhow, I have created the AmiBay thread like I said I would and made like 10 people very happy with them all across Europe...

Errius wrote:

Are Creative drives just not very durable?

Phone agent: "And what model number 8x IDE CD-ROM drive do you have?"
Customer: "GCD-R580B"
Phone agent: "Ok, let's look at your CONFIG.SYS..."

/next call
Phone agent: "And what model number 8x IDE CD-ROM drive do you have?"
Customer: "CD-820E"
Phone agent: "Ok, your RMA number is..."

dpl wrote:

Even old DOS machines will handle 7.2 MB/sec throughput just fine.

No, since you normally have no drivers for DMA mode under DOS and without multitasking either, you'll get heavy load on the CPU with too-fast drives.

derSammler wrote:

They are all 48x speed drives, correct? In this case, they are completely useless for retro PCs. If the system can not handle the constant 7.2 mb/sec. coming from the drive, the disc will spin up and down continually, which will kill the drive quite fast and give performance way behind a native 4x or 8x drive.

That's why you should slow down such drives through software. For DOS you can use CDBeQuiet!. For Windows 9x there are several tools AFAIK.

At idspispod- I'd say 12x/16x is optimal due to many writeable CDs being made for those speeds.

idspispopd wrote:

That's why you should slow down such drives through software. For DOS you can use CDBeQuiet!. For Windows 9x there are several tools AFAIK.

CDBremse (German for "CD Brake") is a very useful tool:
http://ulrichhanke.de/16/CDBremse.html