Hi Everybody,
Anyone out there know how to get the OS to treat CD-RWs as normal removeable media? I'd like to be able to compress stuff directly onto them for archives, but it seems the only way I can do it is to save the archive onto the HD first, then burn the archive onto the CD-RW using Toast. The CD-RW shows up on the desktop as Read-Only, and blank CD-RWs are just ejected from the CD-RW Drive, without bringing up an option to format them. Can the Mac OS do this? How?
System Info: G3 All-In-One 266; 96 MB RAM; RAM Doubler set to 96MB (File-Mapping Only); Mac OS 8.6; QPS Que! CD-RW USB Drive; Toast 3.8 USB, Belkin BusPort USB Card.
Thanks In Advance,
Ster

Try Adaptec's DirectCD
More info at: http://www.adaptec.com/products/overview/directcd.html

I think it would be really cool if Mac OS could automatically treat a CD-RW as a big floppy, without any additional software, kind of like they apparently do with DVD-RAM.

Unfortunately, you do need the (IMHO overpriced) Adaptec software to do this; I've not been able to find any other way.

(I have a beef with Adaptec about this. They've released two updates of their DirectCD software for PCs, with no corresponding updates for the Mac. From the person I corresponded with in sales, they have no plans to update the Mac product, and to make matters worse, DirectCD for the Mac is $69, but DirectCD for the PC is bundled with CD Creator. Grr.)

-g

Two notes about Adaptec DirectCD:
1) It treats CD-RW no better than it treats CD-R: it's write-once. Deleted files are lost space. With CD-RW you can erase the disc and start over, but that's all.
2) Adaptec is very slow with its updates. I recently had to return a 6x4x16 CD-RW to trade it for a 4x4x16 to have something that DirectCD would support.

Get a good active terminator. If your SCSI bus tanks during a long write to disk, you will likely have an unreadable disk once you reboot. You will need to completely erase the CD-RW and start all over. This could be really frustrating if you're using CD-R's.

Even in a perfect world, it's somewhat dangerous to initialize a CD-RW and leave it mounted on the desktop and open for a long time. Most of the time I just assemble stuff on my hard drive first and burn it all in one session. The idea of using CD-R's as "big floppies" doesn't seem possible.

DVD-RAM on the other hand works just like a big Zip disk. In it's current version, it's kinda slow and only holds 2.6gb per side. But that will change soon. I love my DVD-RAM drive for archives and backups.