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Burn CDs with a Compact

tt

Well-known member
I have an external AppleCD 600e. Would it be possible to convert this drive to a CD burner to burn CDs with an SE/30 or other compact mac? Any recommendations on what model drive would work best?

 

Byrd

Well-known member
Hi tt,

yes you could remove the existing Apple 600e drive for a 50-pin SCSI burner, which is a straight swap. These sort of drives are light on the ground now, and many have failed due to overuse. So in other words, get anything you can find - I think 50-pin SCSI CD burners went up to around 16X CD-R and 4X-CD-RW speeds.

JB

 

coius

Well-known member
One issues is just getting CD Burning software for the 68k machines. You could try Toast 4.x.x and see if that works. I had a USB CD-RW Iomega burner that came with a copy of Toast 4. I believe it worked under 68k machine too (FAT code)

The other thing to keep in mind is the data speed. the old hard drives in those machines could barely keep the data going at 1-2x, even if they were SCSI. I also think those particular SCSI Busses topped out around the 5MB/s mark, and because of the speed of the CPU/Bus, I would imagine it would be hard to read from a CD @ 2x (600KB/s) and pull it off in a steady stream without having to stop the flow to write to the hard drive, then re start the flow.

Those machines weren't very powerful, and a lot of issues early on in burning was the buffer under-flow where the machine couldn't get the data to the drive fast enough. I burned coasters all the time back in 1996 with my 4x CD-RW drive (which cost close to $1k IIRC which my dad scored from his business when he was laid off the first time) and that was on a pentium machine!

Plain and simple, the best way to burn is at 1-speed. it's probably the fastest you will get with an old machine.

 

Unknown_K

Well-known member
I have some Teac 6x and 8x external SCSI drives and had no issues burning CDs with my IIfx. I hink I used Toast 3.5x? You are limited by the external SCSI controller wich on most 68K macs is slower then the one the internal devices use. Still I don't see why you can't get 1.2MB+/sec out of the external ports which is good enough to burn 8x.

http://support.apple.com/kb/TA29470?viewlocale=en_US <== shows max data rate for various 68K machines.

So a compact might be stuck at 6X burning.

 

tt

Well-known member
Would pretty much any 50 pin SCSI drive work? Would it need to have compatible OS 7 drivers?

 

Unknown_K

Well-known member
There are no OS 7 drivers, the drivers need to be in Toast or whatever software you burn with. I recall needing an update (was available on the net) to update Toast 3.5 to 3.5.? to use one of my burners.

 

tomlee59

Well-known member
I have burned many discs with my SE/30 running Toast 3.5.x. I recall finding it difficult to get reliable burns at 2x, so my default was 1x. IIRC, Toast required an '020 or higher, so the first generation of compacts is unfortunately out of the running. But being able to burn with, say, an LC is still an achievement.

 
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