Once Burned Twice Shy A New Record
Sydney Morning Herald
Thursday January 15, 1998
IT should be as simple as point and click to put files onto a recordable CD-ROM disk. It shouldn't be any different from copying files from one hard or floppy drive to another, or any more difficult, or any slower. But for reasons I can't fathom, it is.
This is the sort of experience that makes you seriously question whether the Luddites were the fanatical loonies they were painted as being. Computer experts (and God bless me for not being among them) will tell you PCs are not consumer products, not like fridges and toasters. These nerds with attitude (did I get the n wrong?) see the introduction to the great unwashed of these boxes of technological brilliance as one of the greatest and funniest con jobs of all time. They may be right.
The Nomai 680 R.W is a recordable-rewritable CD-ROM drive. You put into it a blank recordable or rewritable CD-ROM disk, select the files from a drive on the PC that you want to store on it, and that's it. In theory.
Adaptec's Easy CD Creator - Deluxe Edition is the software that does all the fetching and carrying. In theory.
In practice, what we're dealing with here are definitely not consumer products.
The technology involved in creating, or burning, your own CDs is probably pretty awesome, but why should the learning curve that goes with it be equally awesome? You don't need a degree in automotive engineering to buy and drive a car. Why does it seem you need a degree in computer science in order to fathom a PC, or the things that go with one?
The reasons for my wanting to try out a recordable-rewritable CD-ROM drive were pretty basic, and not a little mercenary.
1. To copy music CDs for my own listening pleasure.
2. To make backup copies of files and programs I absolutely, definitely don't ever want to lose.
Pretend it's Friday. You're at the supermarket and along with the bread, milk, cheese, condoms and That's Life, you pick up a recordable-rewritable CD-ROM drive and some software that you'll need to make it all hum together. Were there warning signs on the packaging reading Morons Beware - Extremely Difficult Bit of Gadgetry Inside? Of course not. Everything on the packaging suggested the exact opposite: Morons Welcome - Nothing Hard Here At All.
Let's pretend a little more. First, it only took you all of Saturday to instal the internal SCSI-connected CD-Read/Write drive. You already had an internal SCSI card (because the drive is an internal drive, and it has to connect to something; and it doesn't come standard with its own plug-in SCSI card). You already had the necessary cables (and the right ones; SCSI cable can vary enormously). Overcoming the hardware and IRQ conflicts only took you half the night. There, that wasn't hard, was it? This is a fantasy after all.
A little more pretending. Now that your PC recognises it has another drive which it can read from and write to, and has been quite happy in giving it a drive letter all of its own, and everything else hooked up to the PC still works - such as the scanner and modem - you feel quite confident in loading the software that will allow you [all irony intended] to create your own CDs.
Okay, in goes the program CD-ROM disk into your standard CD-ROM drive, and what a surprise! It loads. What's more, it actually seems to run. But then funny things happen. One minute you seem to be able to write something to the blank disk on your read-write CD-ROM drive, but the next you can't. Why is it that a song track that played once doesn't play again? Why does a particular song track pop so badly, especially as it was from a music CD going straight to a blank disk?
You remember reading somewhere in the manual that after you "close" a disk (as against closing a session or a particular song track), having written to it all you want, you can't write to it any more. But hang on, you've only put a few megabytes of data on that disk. Does that mean you have 648Mb that is going to be forever blank just because there wasn't a huge warning somewhere about not "closing" a disk if you were going to put more on it? This isn't like writing to a hard disk or a floppy. And is it slow? The music CDs went through in real time - a 70-minute CD, 70 minutes to write to the disk; 140 minutes if you were foolish enough to "test" the disk first. And data, such as images files and text? At the speed of light by comparison, about 300 kilobytes a second. But when it's nearly 600Mb going through, it takes a long time.
Too bad. It's Sunday night, late. Your partner's left you, you haven't eaten all weekend, you're $1,150, and more, out of pocket, there are a pile of what were once blank CD-ROM disks on your desk that don't seem to be, now, more than just glorified coasters, and you're wondering if you really are as stupid as you're beginning to feel.
Consumer products? Now you realise what the nerds meant. These products are not like cars and fridges. For a start, if you buy a car, you don't buy the body from one shop and the engine from another, and then try to fit the rotten things together yourself. Not if you're sane, anyway.
The Nomai 680 is, technologically, old. It's slow in reading disks, and even slower in writing to them. But old? The technology is no more than two years from creation to marketplace, but its relative age is reflected in its price. The latest technology, read-write drives that are faster, are also more expensive.
It's also not a novelty item and you'd have to pirate and sell a lot of music CDs to make a return on your money, so even as a gesture of defiance to the big music companies, making your own music CDs this way doesn't really rate.
The Nomai's value is in protecting what you create on your PC that you can't afford, financially or sentimentally, to lose - images, letters, accounts, photos, videos (yes, even videos), all those things we create on our PCs and which are often taken away from us by accident, incompetence and failed equipment. Having these treasures on a CD-ROM disk guarantees almost permanent storage. The only way to lose information on a CD-ROM disk is to either lose the disk, or destroy it.
Although the Nomai comes with a suite of software, Adaptec's Easy CD Creator is seen as something of an industry biggy in giving home and small business users a relatively easy-to-use package for making their own CDs, which is why I wanted to try it.
It is easy to use, but despite the overall excellence of the program itself and the documentation, it is only too obvious Easy CD Creator was produced by people for whom creating CDs from scratch is second nature. They haven't given much thought to the poor jerks taking it up for the first time. What's obvious to them isn't necessarily obvious at all.
In theory you can move your home videos through a video-imaging program, a light version of which is included with the Nomai, and then transfer that to a blank CD-ROM disk, turning it into a CD-I (MPEG) movie disk.
In theory you can put anything you have in your PC or can put through it, from sound to pictures to words to programs, onto a CD-ROM disk. In theory.
In practice, you will struggle to find enough reason for such expenditure. The cost of a blank recordable CD-ROM disk ($6) or a blank recordable-rewritable CD-ROM disk ($40) married to the cost of the drive ($1,000) and extra software ($150) hardly seems to be money well-spent, particularly when there are other, cheaper and more efficient storage systems available.
A CD-ROM disk holds about 650Mb. You may well have 650Mb of memories or essentials you want protected for all time. You might have twice or three times that. But to spend $1,150, plus disks, just for that?
Advances in CD-ROM technology, such as DVD where disk capacities of about 14Gb are talked about, tend to make the abilities of existing read-write CD-ROM drives almost laughable.
We have gone a long way from the first 360K floppy disk drives, and have further still to go.
The marketers will still have us believe we're playing with a consumer product designed for quick and easy use, and we'll still keep swallowing that line.
How many lost weekends and grossly disproportionate outlays for end results will we have to put up with before we tell them to shove it?
NOMAI 680 R.W
(recordable-rewritable CD-ROM drive)
From Nomai www.nomai.com
***
$1,000
FOR: Great potential; flexibility; behaves just like a normal CD-ROM drive
AGAINST: Installation nightmares; slow, slow read/write speeds (6x2); price
ADAPTEC EASY CD CREATOR Deluxe Edition
From Adaptec www.adaptec.com
***
$150
FOR: Simple installation; excellent manual and help functions; straightforward
AGAINST: Great until things go wrong
REVIEWED using Gateway 2000's five-star G6-266M, featuring:
* Intel 266MHz Pentium II processor with MMX technology
* 64Mb EDO memory
* 512K L2 integrated cache
* STB 4Mb Virge EDO VRAM PCI graphics accelerator
* 17in Crystal Scan digital colour monitor
* 12-16 speed CD-ROM drive
* 33.6 kps data/fax/voice modem For more information about Gateway 2000 PC systems, phone 1800 061 595 or visit their web site at www.gw2k.com.au
© 1998 Sydney Morning Herald
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