Re: cd writers & linux
On 9 Jun 98 00:43:44 GMT, paul@3dillusion.com (Paul Miller) wrote:
>hmmm... I think rewritable discs are magnetic and they can only be read on
>other CD-RW drives or DVD drives.
No, they still use a laser like conventional CD-R drives. As far as I
understand it, the layer that the pits are burned into during the
writing stage can be heated (by the laser) the essentially "melt" the
pits out of the layer. After that, you can write again. The
technical term is "Phase Change Technology", if that's a help.
>If the drive has a 1MB or 2MB buffer and is only writing at 2X or 4X, why
>does it matter how fast the interface is? Most drives are 2X, which is
>something like 300KB/s.. My motherboard supports up to 20MB/s on both of
>its IDE channels. So even if the drive is on a shared channel, it'll
>still be able to continously write at 300KB/s, right?
In theory, but it's still best to be careful, even with a buffer. I
think the problem is more to do with IDE using too much CPU time,
rather than bandwidth/IO troubles. SCSI uses the CPU much, much less,
and so doesn't really suffer from this.
Rob Wilderspin
--
"But I need it to crash once every few days -
reboots are the only chance I get to sleep..."
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