Burn, baby, burn

A couple of months ago the Yamaha CD-RW in my computer decided to burn out part of its logic board—the part that let it record audio CDs.  This was a problem for two reasons:  first, I had just gotten started on a project to transfer some of my old LPs and cassettes to CD and the failure brought that to a grinding halt, and second, my computer system is completely SCSI—drives, scanner, everything.

Now for those of you who haven’t dealt with it, SCSI == expensive.  Any SCSI-interface drive costs approximately twice what its IDE-interface counterpart does.  This means that replacing the burned-out CD-RW would run about $250 for the cheapest drive around, and what with my employment situation, $250 wasn’t to be had.

So finally I decided to take the chance of dropping an IDE CD-RW into the system, which I’d been avoiding because I didn’t want to wrestle with the headaches of a multi-interface system.  However, I was tired of being stuck, unable to make CDs from any of my antique LPs, so when my mother sent a hundred dollars for my birthday, I hiked myself over to CompUSA and bought a Memorex 40x12x24 IDE CD burner.

This proved a mistake.  There was something wrong with the drive, as far as I could ever make out; the computer and OS saw and identified the drive correctly, but when I tried to use it to install anything, it refused to admit that I’d put the media into the drive tray, grumbling “please insert disc into drive D:” no matter what I did.  Memorex’s customer support line was no help; they succumbed to the idée fixe that the software installation CD must be faulty, promised to send me a replacement—and then did nothing at all.

Eventually I got disgusted with them, yanked out the drive and boxed it up (why yes, I did save the original packaging and sales receipt in case of problems; I’m a normally paranoid geek who knows that things sometimes don’t work and have to be returned), went back to CompUSA, and exchanged it for a Hi-Val 40x10x24 IDE drive.  When I dropped that one in, it cranked right up, identified itself to the system, let me install the CD-burner software, and zoomed right through burning a whole fistful of audio CDs I’d had ready to create.

Conclusions:

1. It is possible to mix SCSI and IDE in the same system if you go about it carefully.
2. Memorex doesn’t make reliable CD burning hardware.
3. Hi-Val may not be a big name brand, but their hardware is affordable and works first time around.

The surfboard pretends to be the wimpy machine gun.  Fnord.