THE CUTTING EDGE: COMPUTING / TECHNOLOGY / INNOVATION : There Are Devices to Help You Circumvent Shortage of CD-ROM Space

We all know what to do when we run out of hard disk capacity: Buy a bigger hard disk. But what do you do if you want more CD-ROM capacity? Buy a multidisc CD-ROM changer.

Although there are methods of compressing more data onto CD-ROM discs, a typical CD-ROM holds a maximum of 780 megabytes. So until a new standard comes along, the only way to increase capacity is to increase the number of CD-ROM discs available on your computer.

Pioneer New Media Technologies (Long Beach, (800) 444-6784) has been the leader in this market for several years, ever since it introduced its first six-disc CD-ROM changer. Currently, Pioneer offers two six-disc changers, the DRM-604X, $995 list, a quad-speed model, and a double-speed unit, the DRM-602X, $495. (Pioneer also has an 18-disc changer for $2495, the DRM-1804X.)

Competition recently arrived from Mountain Network Solutions Inc. (Scotts Valley, (800) 241-3937), whose CD7 CD-ROM Minichanger, a double-speed model that holds seven discs, sells for $599. While the Pioneer and Mountain units have a few characteristics in common, they have important differences as well.

Both are about the same size, with Pioneer’s model being slightly larger at about 8 inches wide, 4 inches tall and 14 inches deep. Both are SCSI-2 devices, which means that your computer must be equipped with a built-in or added-on SCSI-2 interface. That isn’t included in the basic price of the systems, so figure on spending another $100 to $300 if you have to buy an SCSI-2 card. (The acronym stands for Small Computer System Interface, and it offers a faster data transfer method than other external connectors such as parallel or serial ports.)

Macintosh computers come with built-in SCSI and both the Pioneer and Mountain models work with Macintoshes. The Mountain software described here applies only to computers with Microsoft Windows, however.

The most obvious difference between the two systems accommodate CD-ROM discs. Pioneer uses a plastic six-disc magazine with thin swing-out trays, like those used on many six-disc audio CD changers. The advantage is that if you have a large library of CD-ROMs, it is easy to keep them permanently stored in several magazines. You could store your favorite games in one, the kids’ edutainment titles in another, and business data CD-ROMs in another--but the discs go label-side down into the trays of the magazine, which makes it difficult to check which CD-ROM titles are loaded.

Mountain’s mini-changer, built by its parent corporation, Nakamichi Ltd., allows CD-ROM discs to be placed face-up into a slide-out tray. Seven buttons above the tray compartment let you control which position each disc goes into: If you want to change all seven discs, you have to press seven buttons and wait the few seconds each time that it takes for the tray drawer to open and close. But if you only have seven CD-ROMs that you plan to be using, that’s not a problem.

Mountain and Pioneer also take opposite approaches in presenting the multiple CD-ROMs for use on your computer.

Pioneer treats each CD-ROM as if it were a separate disk drive on your computer. If you use the Windows File Manager to see the contents of your drives, you will find six CD-ROM drives indicated after installing the Pioneer unit. That is true whether you have discs in all six mini-trays of the magazine or not.

That is certainly a straightforward way to organize the discs and it works well. Since DOS and Windows can accommodate up to 26 drives (represented with the letters A through Z), you aren’t likely to run out of drive letters for the Pioneer’s six discs even when you are on a network where different subdirectories of the file server are represented as different disk drives on your PC.

Mountain conserves drive letters, however, by using just one for its CD-ROM changer and then treating each disc installed in the changer as a separate subdirectory of that drive.

That concept also is quite logical, but it doesn’t work out to be quite so well in practice, because the subdirectory names that are used are whatever the CD-ROM manufacturer might have chosen, and they’re often not very descriptive. When I placed seven discs in the Mountain changer, for example, one of them was called “candd”--not very useful unless I can remember that “candd” stands for Car and Driver ’95 Buyers Guide . And there is no clue that it is actually installed in tray six, since its name comes first alphabetically.

The CD-PATHfinder software that comes with the Mountain changer does allow you to type in descriptive names for each disc, but they don’t show up in the directory listing. You have to click on a disc and instruct the software to show you the descriptive name if you want to see it.

The best feature of the CD-PATHfinder software is that it will automatically associate a Windows program icon with the appropriate CD-ROM disc. And it will prompt you to reinstall that disc if you click on an icon for a disc that has been removed from the changer. But it is slow to respond because it has to check each disc in the changer first. However, the software can keep track of up to 49 discs that way.

There is one other obvious difference between the two changers: The Pioneer is a quad-speed model and the Mountain is only a double-speed model. But guess what? I couldn’t see any difference between program performance on them. That included full-screen video sequences from Medio’s “Jets” CD-ROM, which appeared to run in full-motion, full-speed regardless of which changer I used to play them.

If you like the Pioneer’s features best, you might want to save money with the double-speed DRM-602X model.