At 1:53 PM -0400 5/11/06, Teo Zenios wrote:
Early CDROM drives (and CDR drives) were expensive and
the caddy system was
rated at 2x or more insertions compared to other types. I guess they were
under the impression that those drives would be used for a decade and should
last a long time. Once CDROM speed started going up, prices started to drop,
and trays became more reliable caddy drives disappeared.
My first CD-ROM drive was an NEC that looks like a discman. My
second was a tray loading 4x Panasonic (I still use this drive
regularly as it's external SCSI and does 512-byte blocks). One of my
favorite drives is the 8x SCSI Plextor caddy drive in my PDP-11/73.
My other favorite is a 32x UW-SCSI Plextor in my DEC PWS 433au
(running OpenVMS). I'm also rather fond of the 16x Plextor SCSI
burner :^)
I find the Caddy drive in the PDP-11 to be very useful as I have far
more caddies than I do PDP-11 CD's. That way I just store the
caddies in a CD storage rack, and slip them in the drive when I need
one.
BTW, I've used that Panasonic for over 10 years now.
Zane
--
| Zane H. Healy | UNIX Systems Administrator |
| healyzh at
aracnet.com (primary) | OpenVMS Enthusiast |
| MONK::HEALYZH (DECnet) | Classic Computer Collector |
+----------------------------------+----------------------------+
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| PDP-10 Emulation and Zane's Computer Museum. |
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http://www.aracnet.com/~healyzh/ |