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Home Theater Upgrade!!!

BRiT> You missed one important key element... SCSI!

When TDK starts making the VeloCD in a SCSI model, I might get interested.
And the Yamaha's are nowhere near the same quality level as Plextor's SCSI drives. In the IDE realm, they're about the same.

And FWIW, I know people that have problems playing audio CD-Rs burned at 4x in regular CD players. Using lower brand media such as Imation and Smart & Friendly, my discs have no problem being played when burned at 12x in my Plextor. So far, it's been nothing but quality, which is why I'm so limited as to what I can upgrade it to.

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Nah, I really didn't miss that, SCSI thing. In this day and age it's really not neccessary unless you want an external unit or just don't have a spare eide connector. I used to never think of getting an EIDE burner until I came across the TDK for a steal price. Now there's no real reason to pay 2x the price for SCSI, if it makes sense in your setup.

My Yammy 6x SCSI has been going great, with no issues at all. I know people who have had issues burning PSX disc at anything above 2x, but I haven't had any issues at 6x. My TDK 12x EIDE is going great as well. I haven't had issues with PSX discs burned at 12x either, and that's using the bulk cdrs too.

I know a few people who've had both Plextors (8x/10x) and Yammy's (8x/12x) who say the Yammy has given them less issues. I think the Plextor issues were straightened out once they finally moved beyond 10x. Those models were a pita.

Anyways, just stick with that model and get those nearly free cdrs and be happy!

--|BRiT|


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"That which does not kill you, makes you wish it did."

"We the willing, lead by the ungrateful, are doing the impossible. We have done so much, with so little for so long, that we are now qualified to do anything with nothing."
 
Originally posted by BRiT:
In this day and age it's really not neccessary unless you want an external unit or just don't have a spare eide connector.
Click to expand...

I can think of a bunch of good reasons why it's still necessary.

1. One IRQ for many devices - I have a dual channel U160 controller in my system. That means I can hook up to 30 devices in my system on a single IRQ. IDE allows for a total of 2 per IRQ.

2. CPU utilization - SCSI still has much lower CPU utilization than the best IDE drives. Even with a BURNProof IDE drive, I would still be hesitant to use my system as I normally do while burning a disc. However, I have no problems whatsoever watching a DVD while burning in the background, or having about 2 dozen applications running simultaneously, or doing batch Photoshop jobs.

3. Simultaneous access - IDE can still only access a single device per channel. SCSI can access every device on the channel simultaneously. IDE never has a chance of taxing the bandwidth of the bus because of the ineffiency of it's transfers, but I may actually be able to squeeze 160MB/sec out of my SCSI devices. I'll never even come close to 100MB/sec with my IDE devices.


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Yes, Yes. Great points about SCSI. But just a lil bit about points #2, with cpu utilization.

With my "burning station" [Celeron 300a@450Mhz, 128M memory, Win2K, 4 year old 11.5G 5400rpm EIDE Maxtor drive] I've had it running RC5-64 or F@H in the background, playing a DVD movie (granted, using the HollyWood Magic+ decoder card) from IDE #1-slave, serving mp3 files to my main system from IDE #2-master, while burning the files on the fly at 12X (Only requires 1800K/sec) without using burn-proof to IDE #2-master CDRW (from a networked drive on some other system or from IDE #1-master drive) without a hitch, using CDRWin (for file compilations or iso images) or CloneCD, all the while using WinVNC to control the burning-station. Granted, this isn't any test of pure hell (like batch photoshoping jobs), but I imagine it comes awefully **** close. It also helps that the CDR software being used knows how to properly build up its own buffer (8 Meg in memory setup).

When I've had the cd-rw on my older main system [770Mhz Athlon Classic, V5 5500, 256M], I've played Q3A/UT while burning without burn-proof without a hitch.

I'm sure on a Dual-CPU or Athlon 1.2+Ghz system it would matter even less.

Anyways, save your money/time and just use cheap CDRs.

--|BRiT|


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"That which does not kill you, makes you wish it did."

"We the willing, lead by the ungrateful, are doing the impossible. We have done so much, with so little for so long, that we are now qualified to do anything with nothing."
 
Sorry BRiT, but while your idea is solid, you're missing some key info.

Every one of those tasks that you pointed out won't tax your CPU in the slightest while a CD is burning.

  • Both RC-5 and F@H only use idle CPU cycles, so if the IDE bus needs CPU cycles, RC-5 and F@H give way and step aside to free up the CPU cycles.
  • Since the Hollywood+ is a hardware decoder, all of the decoding is done on there, and not by the CPU. I've had a H+ in my system, and if the CPU utilization ever got above 1%, it was very out of the ordinary.
  • VNC prides itself on low resource utilization when in use.

Every task you pointed out is not using the CPU while the burn is in progress, so it's hardly a comparison. Still, I have a lot more free CPU cycles to feed to F@H, or any other application I wanted to use, while I'm doing just about anything than one would in using a similar setup in IDE.

So, when you're imagining that it comes awfully close, you're WAY off.
Photoshop, by itself, is using more CPU cycles during one of the batch jobs than all of the tasks you listed, combined.


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Perhaps, but remember that I'm basing this on 3+ year old system, a new system should have no issue at all, and it doesn't. The cpu usage for an eide burner (even at 12x) is nearly non-existent.

Just trying to point out that things have changed considerably over the past 1.5 years in the SCSI-vs-EIDE world for burners.

--|BRiT|


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"That which does not kill you, makes you wish it did."

"We the willing, lead by the ungrateful, are doing the impossible. We have done so much, with so little for so long, that we are now qualified to do anything with nothing."
 
Yes, things have changed on the burner side, but if one has a SCSI card in their system, there's no reason to settle for an IDE burner, simply because SCSI still has so many advantages over IDE as an interface.

In a single drive system, IDE and SCSI are about neck-and-neck in terms of performance. Add one more device onto the same controller, and SCSI takes a huge advantage. And if you want to add the device to a seperate controller, you're now using an IRQ per device.

Regardless of what advances are being made in IDE burners, they're still limited by the drawbacks of the IDE interface. Given that, I'd still choose SCSI if I had to do it over again now.

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