CHARLES ANGELICH wrote in a message to ROY J. TELLASON:

CA>>> Any recent sales on at Best Buy, Office Max, or Office
CA>>> Depot where I can snag a CDRW cheap? My machine and hard
CA>>> drive are too slow to feed a DVD burner or I'd go that
CA>>> route. :-\ 

WC>> How slow is too slow? My inquiry concerns my H.P. 433
WC>> Celeron I intend to upgrade to a Ultra133 I/O card and
WC>> drive. RAM speed limited to PCI 66 revision 1. 

CA>> Well if my present CDRW burner is having buffer
CA>> 'under-runs' even at 4x I'm assuming my hard drive is not
CA>> capable of keeping up with a DVD burner/buffer? 

RJT> Are these both ATA devices? 

CA> Please excuse my ignorance but ATA _is_ the same as IDE isn't it?
CA> If so, yes they are ATA.

They are as far as I'm concerned,  but there is some minor distinction.  I
figured that if I'd said "IDE" then somebody would have
nit-picked that post... :-)

RJT> If so, are they connected to seperate cables? 

CA> Good point. To be honest I've never checked but I will. :-)

I'm not remembering the details at the moment (still recovering from a road
trip here :-) but there's something about that arrangement that provides
better performance than having two devices involved in some transfer both
on the same cable -- I think it was that the interface had to wait for one
device to finish up before it could issue a command to the other, 
something like that.

RJT> It may be the hard drive, or it might be some other aspect
RJT> of the system. 

CA> I had 3 files of 640+meg to burn to CD and had to convert them to
CA> ISO files then defrag the hard drive (4 times) before I could get a 
CA> successful CD burned. That this helped at all tells me the hard 
CA> drive is too slow or the burner is wearing out. The burner has 
CA> never been perfect and has made it's share of coasters but now it's 
CA> every other use the copy fails. 

Although I have a burner here I haven't yet done too much with it,  so I'm
still reading this stuff with interest.  It's installed in a linux
workstation box,  and I used it as a regular CD reader to do the install --
and got a few errors during that process.  I'm hoping that it's not going
to be a problem for me when I do try and get around to using it...

So many project,  never enough time!

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