[skent]

Does anyone have any thoughts or feelings about the Iomega ZipCD burner? I am interested in one but don't want to jump in until I hear some reviews. I am also new at this CD-R & CD-RW thing, can all CD-RW burners also burn CD-R's? or do I have to get one that burns both?

I have a USB ZipCD that I bought to try out (I'm going to return it). It's a pretty good burner, only one coaster so far that's not my fault (I tried to burn a compressed disk image. Instant toaster). The software is ok, but crippled (lacking features like burn from disk image that are found on the full version of toast)

My biggest problem was speed. 4x just doesn't cut it. Well, let me rephrase that. 4x write is fine. It's when you add on the 4-6x read of the entire disk to verify it that it gets to be pain. So a pretty full disk = ~15 mintues to write, ~15 mintues to verify, half an hour. Compare that to a firewire or scsi drive at the same speed and you're looking at 4x write, up to 32x read/verify. You do the math.

-Coyote

[Feathers]

Coyote, wise words as regards speed etc. Personally I think RW's are a waste of time, considering the cost of the media. I've never wanted to "go back" and rewrite a CD, if you write a CD-R in session mode you can always add to it later which is almost as good (although I've never wanted to do that either).

I have an 8x24 SCSI burner and it's my second favourite peripheral! What Mac do you have?

I've got a Pismo 500. The ZipCD is USB, and I haven't had _any_ problems with getting it to burn at 4x. Probably because I have a defragged HD, and the pismo HD is pretty darned fast. The way I see it, you only need one or two CD-RW's at most, and that's only if A: you're a cheapskate and don't want to burn coasters when you're trying something new or B: Your drive has trouble. Either way, the time spent erasing a CDRW is in my book worth more than then 50cents to 1dollar for another piece of CDR media. I'm probably going to get the Sony 10x drive. I'm waffling between that and buying an ultraportable or internal drive for the notebook. For anyone else out there reading this, remember: When you see a USB drive advertised as 4x 4x 20x, what they mean is that the _mechanism_ is rated at 4x 4x 20x. What you'll really get is something more like 4x 4x 4x. And if you care about your data and verify it, that means you have to pratically double your burning time.

-Coyote

Recently, I bought Iomega ZipCD 650.
So far, I've burned some games and programs on six CD-R disc. They are readable beautifully!

Verify is not necessary. If you want to know if it works, just put the cd in CD Rom driver and see if it's readable.


G3ernie


[This message has been edited by G3ernie (edited 05-13-2000).]

Sadly, verify is necessary. Just because the disk mounts doesn't mean that there aren't errors on it. I've already had one disk where verification failed halfway through the disk. It still mounts just fine.

-Coyote

[BigMark]

Originally posted by Coyote:
Sadly, verify is necessary. Just because the disk mounts doesn't mean that there aren't errors on it. I've already had one disk where verification failed halfway through the disk. It still mounts just fine.

-Coyote

Funny you should mention this.Whilst I agree that verify is relevant/necessary, I burnt a CDR with Toast 4 and it was verified to be OK. However, on opening it up once inserted in the normal CDROM drive, the disk was basically unusable.

Can somebody who has a ZipCD tell me how much buffer memory there is? 1 or 2 Mg?
iomega doesn't seem to want to display it on there website...

Thanks.

[Trapper]

Fady: memory buffer is 2 mg.

------------------
Travis Hreno
Department of Philosophy
University of Western Ontario
London, Ontario
CANADA
threno@julian.uwo.ca

Just fyi for everyone.

i decided to try to burn an audio CD from Mp3s before I return the ZipCD (it's too slow for my taste). Results were good.

Here's my config:
Pismo 500
ZipCD
Toast 4.1

Burning Audio at 4x was no problem at all. No minimal system extensions or anything, just launch and go. Got one coaster from a bad Mp3, but only the one song was affected. Reburnt it and it came out fine. If all you're going to do is burn audio, the ZipCD isn't actually that bad, as there's no verify phase, so that works out to max of like 15-20 minutes per disk.

-Coyote