Fushigi said:
True enough on the Yamaha but I got my 32x way before then & the 48x unit around the same time the Yamaha was released; I remember reading reviews.
I bought a 32X LiteOn also -- probably the same recorder you have if you also bought the "Best Buy special." I use mostly as a CD reader in my "Internet Computer." I already know that it is not as accurate at performing DAE as my "old" Yamaha CRW-4416S, which I now have connected to an Akai sampler. I had both the Yamaha 4416 SCSI and the LiteOn 32X ATAPI connect to my "Internet Computer" using Adaptec EZ CD Creator 4.0.5.
My old burner was SCSI .. a Yamaha 4x4x16. Frankly, for the duty it saw it became problematic before it should have. And LiteOn's reputation seems to be pretty solid. Getting the 48x for about $60 was the icing on the cake and it's even cheaper now; the current cheapest price for the Yammy is $195.
A couple of things here:
1.) At work, we have several CRW-4260 and CRW-4416 -- all SCSI units installed into external metal CI Design SCSI cases. From the production logs, EACH of these recorders have had anywhere from around 15000 to around 24000 disc recorded over the past 4 years. They are all *still* writing data CD-R discs everyday -- some in a duplicator, some others connected to office computers. The group was partly replaced with some 16X and 20X Yamaha recorders over a year ago, then completely replaced recently with some more CRW-F1S recorders a couple of months ago. The only problem that I've noticed about these old Yamaha units is that some of them don't open and close the tray as fast as they used to.
2.) Speed is not everything! I do not particularly trust the recent crop of inexpensive
>40x CD recorders. I have some reservations about just how accurately these units write and just how "archival" their recordings are. In these regards, I also have some lesser reservations about current high-speed CD-R media.
Now, I probably would have spring for the Yamaha anyway if it had shipped with an LVD 68 pin interface. But Yamaha chose 50 pin instead. IIRC that was the nail in the coffin. Come on, modernize!
Well, a while back I thought that Yamaha did go to D-68, but come to find out a bit later that they had only upgraded the SCSI communications from "Fast" (10 MB/s) to "Ultra" (20 MB/s).
Better than going to wide SCSI (D-68) would be if LVD was introduced. The LVD Ultra2 specifications defined a "narrow" 8-bit channel and D-connector, but to my knowledge, no manufacturer has ever produced a SCSI device with a narrow LVD interface. Use of an LVD interface on a SCSI CD-R/W drive would allow for much longer cabling. All is not lost, though. On the horizon is SA-SCSI (Serial Attached SCSI), which will allow long bus lengths.