Infos about CD writers (in case you don't have one yet)

• Philips and Plextor CD writers (and similar ones, like Ricoh RO1402C) tend to cause SCSI troubles, especially if reselection is enabled for the CD writer. On some systems, you can enable reselection, on others you can't. Although MakeCD works without reselection, it works much better and much more reliable if you turn on reselection! We recommend to test these drives on your system before buying them.
• We can't recommend to buy Philips CDD 2000 or similar ones. The tend to have/get a lot of hardware problems. Many Philips CDD 2000 / HP SureStore 4020i and similar ones needed repair after a few weeks or months.
• Philips CDD 2600 causes reselection problems on some systems. Maybe you will be happy with that drive, maybe you won't. And here's a statement from Philips about another problem: "Tests have shown that the CDD2600 is not 100% reliable when reading audio CDs or packet written CDs at 6x speed. This problem is caused by the hardware and can *not* be solved via a firmware upgrade".
• Sony CDU926S worked fine in our tests when writing data. No SCSI hangups at all. However, we sometimes noticed trouble when reading CDDA data from the drive when changing the tracks. We hope to find a workaround for this problem in the future, but we can't promise anything. We did these tests on a A3000 and on a A4000T. These problems didn't occur with a G-Force onboard SCSI host adapter with GuruROM.
• Yamaha CDR 100/102 are very good CD writers. We really can recommend them. We could not find anybody who reported any SCSI problems with Yamaha CD writers. There are a few firmware bugs in these CD writers, but they are not too serious.
• Yamaha CDR 400 is a recommended drive, too. There are some minor firmware bugs (writing of audio with preemphasize is not possible upto V1.0d), but it seems to be reliable.
• Ricoh MP6200S didn't cause any problems either. It works fine.
• JVC XR-W2010 works on some systems - and on others, it doesn't. We never noticed any SCSI hangup, but there were very strange effects depending on the configuration used for the tests. Maybe you will be happy with this drive, maybe you will hate it. Depends. ;-)
• We don't have much experiences with the other drives, so we don't want to make any statements there.

Patrick Ohly and Angela Schmidt