Recommended CD writers

At the moment, we have statements about the following CD writers. Please don't forget to check if they section Working systems or section Systems causing problems with your system.

Yamaha CDR 100/102 (recommended)

These CD writers don't have any known SCSI problems. They are old, but known as very reliable drives. People tell, they don't get any coasters when using these drives.

Yamaha CDR 200/400 (recommended)

This is the new generation of Yamaha drives. Since they are not yet available for a long time (as of 7/97), we can't tell how long they live. But they seem to work reliable and people report they don't get any coasters when using these drives.

Yamaha CDR 2260/4260 (recommended)

This is the CD-RW generation of Yamaha drives. Since they are not yet available for a long time, we can't tell how long they live. But they seem to work reliable and people report they don't get any coasters when using these drives.

Yamaha CRW-4416S (recommended)

This is the next CD-RW generation of Yamaha drives. The same things apply as for the Yamaha CDR 2260/4260 drives.

Ricoh MP6200S (recommended)

This is a new (as of 7/97) CD-RW drive. If you'ld like to be able to write up to 1000 times on a CD-RW, you should consider buying this drive. Seems to be a good deal! People report they don't get any coasters when using this drive.

TEAC CDR50S, TEAC CDR55S

We never had these drives, but the users who have one seem to be happy with it.

Plextor PX-R412 (depends)

Seems to be a reliable drive but does not work with every SCSI hostadapter. Be careful!

JVC (be careful!)

There are some people who really like their JVC drives, and others, who have nothing but problems. Although it obviously doesn't cause SCSI hangups, it sometimes reports strange errors and creates coasters. Seems to have problems caused by firmware bugs.

Ricoh 1420 / CDR_Plextor (be careful!)

The Plextor drive totally confused our SCSI hostadapter. We don't know if Ricoh 1420 is better in this point.

Sony (be careful!)

Sony CDU 926S won't be able to perform DAO writing. So it's good for TAO mode only. The drive we had got hangups when reading audio tracks while starting to read a new track.

Philips/HP (be careful!)

Philips and HP drives don't work with every SCSI hostadpater. Sometimes, reselection problems appear, e.g. on A3000 or GVP hostadapters. This results in coasters. Additionally, the old Philips/HP generation (CDD 2000/HP 4020) suffer from hardware problems. Many of these drives need repair every few months. The new Philips/HP generation (CDD 2600/HP 6020) have problems when extrating audio data.

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