My friends have been so jealous because I could burn CDs while playing StarCraft on LAN partys on my K6-2/333.
Ok, I had a NCR/Symbios/LSI-Logic 875 SCSI controller, a 4 GB IBM SCSI HDD and a PlexWriter SCSI.
I think SCSI Busmaster could make the difference - even on a 486.
From 1995 I can report from win on cd 3.5 that with iso images on 486 dx 2.66 with scsi adaptec ultra 2wide and burner I do not know more
My 386 SX 20 does not have any problem burning image files in double speed.
Re: Post your 386 Speedsys results here
I use a PlexWriter SCSI.
Software is WinOnCD 3.7 on Windows 95B.
It even works on-the-fly.
I have used my 486DX2 with 4Mb of ram and a Philips CDD2600 scsi. Dos command line burner program. Done more than 100 CD.
I burned CDs on early Pentiums, even copies CDs on the fly from CD to CDR drive, but you needed them to be on SCSI BUS.
You probably could get away with using IDE drive and IDE burner if they were both master on separate IDE cables, DMA was enabled, and you didn't touch the keyboard while it copied.
I have burned CDs on my Mac IIfx (68030/40) using SCSI drives but the HD was on a Nubus FWB Jackhammer using 68 pin connector.
On the PC side discjuggler was used for funny ISOs with audio tracks.
Collector of old computers, hardware, and software
tl,dr - it's a matter of software, the data rate is moderate. 1 x means 150 kBps.
I'm rather sure that on older systems, a scsi setup would help.
I like jumpers.
With newer IDE drives with hardware support for buffer underrun protection (burnproof, etc), one could presumably use even the slowest 386 with CDRDAO under Linux to burn a CD .
In the heyday of the 486, SCSI was helpful due to CPU cycle saving DMA support .
