First post, by bjt
- Rank
- Oldbie
My old CD drive, a Panasonic/Matushita 4X writer, recently started to die. It would intermittently lock up, causing the hard drive light to stay on solidly and wouldn't even eject. I replaced it with a Pioneer DVD burner I had lying around which worked fine but has that awful jet engine sound when spinning up.
I got hold of a 4x Pioneer drive (DR-UA124X) to replace it. This drive was made in 95, Japan made and is pretty hefty, definitely good quality mechanically. After cleaning the lens with some alcohol it reads CDs and CD-Rs fine and is nice and quiet.
However, the firmware on this drive is crap. It only works reliably in slave mode, returns garbage for its detection string and only works with Pioneer's ATAPI_CD.SYS, not the Oak ATAPI driver. It also doesn't work with Win9x's native ATAPI support.
Was this really the norm in the early days of ATAPI CD drives? Can anyone recommend another 4x ATAPI drive, or was SCSI still the way to go around this time?