Testing CD-ROM Drives: Mac and PC
Because of the rapid growth in publication of CD-ROM programs, there are more reasons every day to install a CD-ROM drive in your computer.
The 4.75-inch plastic discs that play in these drives can store more than 600 megabytes of data, the equivalent of more than 250,000 pages of text or thousands of images. They also can store sound, in CD format just like the music discs from which the technology was derived, or as digitized audio data.
With all that capacity, the CD-ROM disc is a natural for everything from nationwide telephone directories to encyclopedias to a complete tour of the National Gallery in London.
CD-ROM stands for Compact Disc Read-Only Memory, which means the discs can be played but you can’t add data to them as you can a floppy diskette or a hard disk.
If you are about to buy a PC or a Macintosh, you would be well advised to spend a few hundred dollars extra to get one equipped with a CD-ROM drive, a stereo audio system and a couple of speakers, so you will be ready to play any CD-ROM disc that catches your fancy.
If you already own a fast, late-model computer, it’s worth adding a CD-ROM drive. Although models are available for installation inside the computer, in most cases an external CD-ROM drive is the only kind your computer will have room for.
Just like everything concerning computers, speed is an issue in CD-ROM drive choice, with so-called double-speed models being the most common these days. There are a few triple-speed and quadruple-speed models, and by the end of the year, quad-speed units probably will be common.
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For typical office and home uses today’s double-speed drives work just fine, so there’s no reason to wait for faster models to proliferate. But be aware that various manufacturers measure drive speed in different ways, so their specifications may not be directly comparable. If top performance is critical, study the comparisons in the leading computer magazines before you choose.
I tested two external CD-ROM drives, the CDX-535 from Chinon America Inc. and the TXM3401E1 from Toshiba American Information Systems Inc. Both work with Macintosh and PC computers, but you have to buy them packaged specifically for your type of computer to get the right cables, software and, in the case of PCs, the right interface card.
Typical prices for Chinon models range from about $350 to $450. For the Toshiba, prices run below $400 for the PC version and under $450 for the Mac version.
Both are suitable for multimedia use. They comply with industry specifications such as multimedia PC (MPC), multisession Photo CD, CD audio and CD-ROM XA (extended architecture).
For Macintosh models, all you have to do is plug them into the computer and install the software drivers. For PCs, you need at least an interface card installed in a slot inside the computer and connected to the CD-ROM drive by a cable.
In a business setting where the CD-ROM discs may contain only data, you don’t need a sound card in the PC. (Macs have sound built in.) But for home, you’ve got to have sound to get full use of all the reference and entertainment CD-ROM programs aimed at that market. That means you need a second card for your PC unless you buy a sound card that also has an interface connector for a CD-ROM drive.
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It is a peculiarity of CD-ROM discs that they may contain two kinds of sound recording. CD audio sound can be played by the drive itself, which you can hear through earphones plugged into the drive. But digitized sound has to be converted by a sound card before it can be heard. In encyclopedia CD-ROMs, for instance, digitized sound tracks may accompany a video sequence of a famous speech, with CD-audio sound tracks to demonstrate the works of a famous composer.
If you have two slots available in your computer you shouldn’t have any trouble getting the sound card and the CD-ROM card to coexist, but if you expect to have one card handle both sound and the CD-ROM drive, be careful. The two devices are not universally compatible, so you need to make sure the systems you intend to combine will work together.
Both the Chinon and Toshiba CD-ROM drives tested have similar performance specifications: the Chinon drive claims a “sustained” transfer rate of 300 kilobytes a second and a 280-millisecond seek time; the Toshiba drive claims an “average” transfer of 327 kilobytes a second with a “random” seek time of 200 milliseconds and full-stroke access time of 325 milliseconds.
In use with a variety of educational, reference and entertainment CD-ROM discs, I couldn’t discern any performance difference between them.
The Chinon is much smaller than the Toshiba, so it fit better on my cramped desktop. The Chinon is 6 inches wide, 2 1/4 inches high and 10 inches deep (but you need to allow at least another 4 inches for the thick cable and connector).
The Toshiba 8.75 inches wide, 2 3/4 inches high and 9.5 inches deep, and needs the same rear clearance. A major reason for the Toshiba’s girth is its internal power supply, which means its electrical cord plugs directly into an outlet. The Chinon, on the other hand, takes its power from an AC adapter that measures about 2 1/2 inches by 2 1/2 inches by 5 inches and gets hot to the touch.
The Chinon adapter card was very easy to install and offers 16 alternate settings to resolve conflicts with other cards in the computer. The Toshiba card has six alternates and none of them worked on my computer until, with help from Toshiba’s technical service department, I made a fundamental change in my computer’s system setup instructions. It means that the Toshiba card is less forgiving of system aberrations than the Chinon card.
