Interesting conquest

[Quadraman]

Pioneer 6 disc CD-ROM changer

It holds the equivalent of a 4gb hard drive if you load up 6 full CD's and unlike a hard drive, you can change all or part of the contents of the drive with a CD swap. I'm going to burn as much 68k software as I can find and tether it to the 840AV as a file server.

 

[Osgeld]

I saw those when it was new and spiffy, kinda still want one (but not that much lol)

neat

 

[Anonymous Freak]

Dang... Had one of those in high school, in the auto shop, of all places. They had just gotten the repair manuals for pretty much every car ever made on CD-ROM set, and had them in that, connected to an old IBM PC-AT with a light-pen touch screen display. The interface was pure MS-DOS text-mode to find the page you wanted to view, which would switch to graphics to display the page. IIRC, the CD changer came WITH the repair manual set. (Heck, the whole computer may have.)

Now the question is, is it smart internally, or does the system need to command all the disc changes? (i.e. does it mount all six discs immediately, then do the disc swapping itself based on which one you select?)

 

[aftermac]

I have one of those, too. Haven't had it hooked up in years though. Nice conquest!

 

[Osgeld]

to recap freaks question, how does it work

audio model you manually select disk and track, how does a changer work on a pc? (cause I never had one to play with)

 

[Quadraman]

I'm not quite sure how it's going to work but all the documention and drivers are still available at Pioneers' website, so I'm going to head over there and download everything. I never assume that anything I buy used is going to come with any of the materials that it originally had when it shipped new, but it would be a nice surprise if it did.

Something else I just found out. Pioneer made one of these that holds 18 CD ROMs. Probably never find one of those for sale, though, unless it's at one of those places that sells obsolete parts at outrageous prices.

Oh, and it can also be used as a CD jukebox if you load it with audio CDs.

 

[Anonymous Freak]

I'm pretty sure the 18-disc model just used three six-disc caddies.

On another note: my parents still use a home CD player from Pioneer that uses this same caddy. Probably bought it in 1989 +/- 2. (Yeah, if I weren't at work, I'd have just used Opt-Shift-= to get the proper +/- sign. I did hit Win-Shift-=, only to discover it just printed +.)

 

[Bunsen]

Yep, used to have the audio version here. It's definitely the same caddy.

 

[Christopher]

I've seen that Pioneer Cartridge in pretty much every single 6 disc CD changer Pioneer ever made. Which is awesome because it would work in the car, in your house and in that thingamabob!

 

[Torbar]

I have a 200ish CD Rom version made by some other brand. It's the size of a desktop tower and has 2 CD readers build in I think

 

[H3NRY]

There was a refrigerator-size changer that used 2 drives and 48 of those 6-CD magazines at Goodwill last month. 8-o Quite the monster jukebox!

 

[Quadraman]

I found a photo of the 18 disc changer and it does use three cartridges of six.

I also found this

This one can hold 720 DVD's or DVD ROM's.

That's 3 TB of files! 8-o

 

[Anonymous Freak]

That's 3 TB of files! 8-o

If they're dual-layer DVD-ROMs, factory-pressed, that's 6 TB.

Which is also one of these. (They have an 8 TB model now, too, which, when you use the much safer RAID-5 option, gives you 6 TB usable.) In rather smaller volume of space, and much faster at random-access.

 

[Paralel]

That sucker reminds me too much of HAL with its omnipresent eye... :O