Best ext CD drive for SE/30 - 300e or 600e?

[TimHD]

I have both the Apple CD 300e (2x) and CD 600e (4x) ext. cd rom drives for my SE/30 and want to offload one of them. Based on the specs below, the 600e is a faster drive but I wonder if this is overkill for the SE/30?

Having used both drives with the SE/30 it seems the 'faster' 600e spends a lot of time re-reading the cd drive and was wondering whether this was because it is reading the data faster than the SE/30 can handle and hence it spends a lot of time reloading the buffer/waiting to read data (ie noisy). This benchmark suggests the SCSI bus is practically limited to 1,850kb/sec (eg with a 4MB/s rated hdd) so maybe it is overkill to use an 600e...

http://lowendmac.com/2000/mac-se30-benchmarks/

So is the 300e enough? Or do I keep the faster 600e?

AppleCD 300e Plus/600e Specs

-------------------------------------------

Block Rate:

Double speed:

Mode 1: 300K/sec.

Mode 2: 342K/sec.

Quadruple speed (600e only):

Mode 1: 600K/sec.

Mode 2: 684.4K/sec.

Normal speed: 75 blocks/sec.

Double speed: 150 blocks/sec.

Quadruple speed: 300 blocks/sec. (600e only)

300e SCSI Transfer Rate:

Approximately 2.5 MB/sec.

600e SCSI Transfer rate:

Approximately 5.1 MB/sec.

 

[Byrd]

Sounds like the laser on the 600e is going out over anything else, making it result in slower seek times whilst trying to read a CD.

 

[Paralel]

Agreed. Either the laser is dying, its supporting electronics are dying or possibly even the laser emitter and/or the lens are dirty. The only reason a drive reads data again and again is because it wasn't able to get all of it in the first pass, which means its a drive issue. If it could ready it successfully, it would just sit the data in the buffer and wait for the system to catch up and the drive would idle until then, no drive re-reads data it has read the first time correctly.

The buffer size of the 600e is 256k, that should be way more than enough to give the system time to catch up and make the reading process appear seamless. I have absolutely no doubt you have a drive problem.

 

[unity]

Re-cap time for the drive? I cant say for sure, just a guess. Never opened one up!

 

[SE30_Neal]

I have no idea the cause but sfter getting into vintage stuff recently its safe to say the electronics simple weren't expected to last this long so would also go back to clean up and re-cap just because it seems the obvious route to try first

 

[Unknown_K]

Dirty laser maybe OR it doesn't like burnt CDs (try using originals if you are not).

 

[TimHD]

Would a dirty laser be possibly fixed by a lens cleaner cd (assuming it's not the caps)? Given the 300e is a few years older than the 600e and theyseem to be similar mechanisms a little surprised it's dying before the older 300e.

That aside, more specifically, putting aside whether the 600e has issues or not, given the 5.1mb/s vs 2.5mb/s speeds coming up against a scsi interface that can only do 1.8mb/s (even if there's a 256k buffer on the 600e), do I really NEED the 'faster' drive.

NB: I should add that the 300e has little or no fading whereas the 600e has a drive tray and outer case that is different colour (yellowing) to the drive's platinum facia, so if there's no real difference attaching both to the Se/30, I'd prefer to keep the 300e.

 

[SE30_Neal]

If you want to sell the other i'd be interested, clean it up, de-yellow and strip it down. Let me know

 

[Paralel]

Sounds like you want to keep and use the 300e. Stop trying to find reasons to justify otherwise.

 

[TimHD]

Just following up on this after some further testing which produced some interesting results.

Testing: Since last post I have:

 - acquired a CD/DVD lens cleaner and used it on the Apple CD 300e and Apple CD 600e x 2* drives.

 - *acquired another Apple CD 600e (in case the one I had did have a faulty laser issues)

 - run file transfer 'speed' tests on the Mac SE/30, System 7.5.5, 32MB (retested with Mode 32 on and off). nb: manual timing only.

 - run the same file transfer tests with the Quadra 630CD's 600i CD drive as a comparison test platform.

Results:

In short, it looks like the 600e CD, while physically a faster device, seems to operate no faster than the 300e on the SE/30 and operated with less stability in some cases, with transfer errors arising during large file transfer jobs. See test results below. Not scientific, but helpful enough. 

Media: HFS Format File Transfer CD (burned on iMac G3)

Files: MS Word 4.0 folder, 19mb 173 files 

 300e. 3 minutes 20 secs

 600e. 3 minutes 21 secs!!

 600e. 3 minutes 20 secs!!

Media: "Legacy Software" CD (HFS I presume, bought from 3rd Party):

Files: Mac OS 7.5.3 folder, 29mb 20+ files, mostly disk images 

 300e. 2 mins 5 secs

 600e. Error at Disk image 11 (about 25 seconds in)

 600e. Error same as above.

Alt Test Platform: Quadra 630CD (600i) - both CDs above

Files:  MS word 4.0, 19mb 173 files

600i.  1 min 24 secs

Files:  Mac OS 7.5.3 folder, 29mb 20+ files

600i.  50 seconds! [ie the CD media is fine]

So, my concerns with the 600e might be valid as it seems the SE/30 is limiting the performance of the 600e drive. I didn't try attaching the CD600e to my Quadra, as frankly I need them to work on the SE/30 and suspect that the errors on the large file transfers (as seen on the Mac OS Disk Images as opposed to large no. of files transfer test with the MS Word folder) might be due to the 600e supporting a larger block transfer mode that maybe kicks in when large files are presented to it and for some reason the SE/30 can't work with that... 

Unless anyone can think of a reason for these variances, I think I might have a few Apple CD 600e's for sale (PM me)...

 

[techknight]

These drives are full of electrolytics. They probably are leaking by now, 

And... the laser assemblies do wear out if they were used a shit ton in their lifetime. 

Last year I recapped a Sony portable CD discman, the first one released. Ill never recap one of those again... 200+ caps later. lol.