Burn your CD with HP SureStore, but don't break the law
By Zatni Arbi
JAKARTA (JP): Compact Discs, or CDs, have become as common as mosquitoes in the dry season. You can easily find both legal and pirated CDs, each containing dozens of expensive software programs or feature movies. Soon there will be even more as rewritteable CD-ROM drives become widely available.
Together with Mitsubishi Chemical Corp, Verbatim Corp, Philips Electronics, Ricoh Company Ltd, Sony Corporation and Yamaha, Hewlett-Packard has spearheaded a new standard for rewritteable CDs. Called CD-RW, it is a CD that you can treat more or less like a large-capacity floppy diskette. You can write your files on it, read these files and later erase them.
But, most likely, your CD-ROM drive cannot read a CD-RW because this new CD format needs a different type of laser beam.
Fortunately, as more and more drive makers have expressed their intention to make their drives capable of reading CD-RWs, an increasing number of new drives will be have the required capability called MultiRead. If you're looking for a new CD-ROM drive, you might as well start looking for this feature.
At least one CD writer that can write and erase files on a CD- RW is already available. The new Ricoh's MediaMaster costs about US$699. It can write, read and erase CD-RWs and it can write and read CD-R too. It reads ordinary CD-ROMs at six speed.
But CD-RWs have limitations. We cannot erase only a single file on the platter; we will have to erase and reformat the entire CD and rewrite the whole enchilada. The reformatting takes more than an hour, and may restrict how practical CD-RWs will be.
Besides, there are cases where you would want your new CD to be permanently burnt. This includes corporate multimedia presentations, in which you do not want people to alter the data it contains. This is also true with catalog of products and books on CD-ROMs.
SureStore 6020
I remember the first CD-Writer I tested more than three years ago. It was a Sony, and it was as big as a laser disc player. It cost more than Rp 4 million (US$1,606) and did not work. There was no off-the-shelf software that could make it work, so the company that let me test it finally had to order custom-made software for it.
For a long time CD-burning was tantamount to money burning. The failure rate was very high, and once a blank CD was spoiled it was useless.
But things have changed, and HP has been the most influential force behind this change. Continuing its tradition of pushing prices down, HP has released a new series of CD-Writers called HP SureStore 6020. These popular CD-Writers are cheap and reliable. Courtesy of Hewlett-Packard Indonesia, I was able to test drive a parallel-port version. I was told the retail price of the external version is Rp 1.5 million, down 30 percent on just a couple of months ago.
We could put a SureStore 6020 drive and another CD-ROM drive in a system simultaneously and both will work. Both can read data from various types of CDs.
Wide range
HP SureStore CD-Writer comes in three different versions. The 6020i is the SCSI internal version, the 6020es is the SCSI external version. The one that I tested was a 6020ep.
This parallel port version was also a SCSI version. The only difference from 6020es was that I got the parallel connection cable in the box instead of a SCSI cable and a SCSI adapter. If I bought an extra SCSI-2 adapter and a high density SCSI-2 connector, the 6020ep would become a 6020es.
The parallel port connector has a pass through printer port to which we connect the printer cable. I had no problem printing with this CD-Writer connected.
Do you want to know what the figure 6020 means? The drive reads CDs at six speed and writes at double speed. A CD can hold about 650 MB of data. If you record music on a CD, you can get up to 74 minutes or 99 separate tracks. One piece of music on your Dave Grusin's album represents one track.
The SureStore CD-Writer can record a wide range of CD formats, including audio CD, CD-XA, multisession CD, mixed mode CD, and CD Extra. Of course, it writes a regular CD-ROM. A video CD belongs to the CD-XA standard.
I tested the SureStore 6020ep using three different notebooks, the Micron Transport Xpe that I reviewed last week, a Toshiba 205CDS, and a Scenic Mobile 300 from Siemens Nixdorf.
I had no problem with the first notebook. The two CDs I burnt with it worked flawlessly. But I could not burn any CD with the other two notebooks. There could be several reasons for this, including incompatible software programs and the proprietary parallel port that Scenic Mobile 300 might have (its external floppy drive connects via this port).
The software that comes with the CD-Writer is Easy-CD Pro from Adaptec, the leader in SCSI interface cards and CD-writing software. Once the software loads, we can choose to call on the Easy-CD Wizard, create a new project or open a saved one. Every CD-writing session is considered a project, and we can save it to create an exact duplicate CD. The Easy-CD Wizard will guide us step by stepto create a data or audio CD.
On its manual mode, we can record a data CD, an audio CD or a mixed-mode (data plus audio) CD. We can copy directly from another CD or from an image that is already available on the hard disk. An image is an exact representation of a CD comprising all the data and its layout.
With SureStore 6020, we can mix audio tracks from different music CDs into one that we can play in our car CD player. To create an audio CD containing tracks from different CD sources, all we have to do is load the CD-Deck utility. This program is in many ways similar to the CD-player that our Windows has. It allows us to create a unique name for the CD in the drive and the individual tracks on it.
We can also drag selected tracks of a particular CD and drop them into the list of tracks to be written to the new CD. During the writing, we will be prompted to insert the selected audio CD. The software also helps us create CD sleeves automatically.
Besides Easy-CD Pro, HP also includes Alchemy Personal. This software lets us build, save and search image and document databases. We can use it to archive our files onto CDs. Direct CD-to-CD copying requires a SCSI-2 CD-ROM drive as the source drive.
An audio cable is included to let us to listen to an audio CD through the PC's sound card. The CD-Writer is powered by an external power supply, which is rated for 100 to 240 Volt input. Strangely, no power-on switch is available for the drive or the power supply, so it has to be left on all the time. This is necessary because the printer pass-through port will not work if we forget to plug in the power cord before printing.
Success factors
Some of the factors that affect the speed at which CDs are recorded are the speed of the hard disk and the type of port. According to the manual, a 486DX-66 is fast enough for CD writing, as long as the PC has an Enhanced IDE hard drive and an EPP or ECP parallel port. The minimum RAM requirement is 8 MB if you run Windows 3.x. You will need 16 MB of RAM if you run Windows 95.
The best thing about the software is that we can have it test the hardware configuration before writing. Among other things, the software will test whether the hardware can write at double- speed. If not, it will test again for single-speed. If our system is too slow even for single-speed writing, the software will give up and flash a message. All these tests make the process longer, but significantly reduce the probability of failure. At double- speed, it takes about a minute to write 17 MB of data.
A CD-Writer is still a viable solution for archiving data, backing up hard disks, and creating and distributing presentations. Because it is cheaper than CD-RWs, it is also a good choice for testing a master CD before having it factory- duplicated. The blank CDs cost me Rp 25,000 each. In the United States, if you buy in bulk for $6 each. For comparison, the price of one blank CD-RW in the United States is about $25.
CD-RW will become the chosen format in the future but because the CD-ROM drives on today's PCs have long lives, it will be quite a while before they are replaced by the new CD-RW capable ones.
If you need to burn a CD of your corporate profile to be distributed to your prospective clients, for example, you would be better to use a conventional CD-Writer like HP SureStore 6020. This way you can be sure that everybody can read your CD.