By William LaMartin, Editor, Tampa PC Users Group
| HP CD-Writer Plus 820i By William LaMartin, Editor, Tampa PC Users Group |
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I am almost never the first to buy into new technology. How long have CD-Writers been out? Certainly over five years. I do remember the first ones I took serious notice of cost around $1,000 and wrote at a 1X speed and read at 2X speed. I think the very first ones were over $1,500. Furthermore the writable CD media was quite expensive. Didn’t each such CD cost $10? Well, things have changed a lot now. The Hewlett Packard CD-writer Plus 820i that I recently purchased is a 4 speed write, 4 speed rewrite, and a 24 speed read. The drive cost $350, but if you go with another brand and a 2x rewrite speed and a little slower read speed you can probably get one for around $150. And the regular recordable (not rewritable) CD's are now under $1.00 each when bought in quantity.
Until recently I have really had no need for a CD-Writer, but since I started writing Visual Basic programs with database connectivity I have watched a typical VB program installation setup go from two 1.44 MB floppies to at least eight such floppies. Who wants to return to the days of feeding numerous floppies into the computer to install a program. So it's time to move on to installation via CD's.
Of course, CD-writers have other uses. The main one for me is data storage. I can now quit using 100 MB Zip disks to archive all of the images I have scanned in from photos, negative and slides. I can archive all my writing, spreadsheet, database, VB programming, Corel Draw, and whatever other files I can think of on CD. And one CD will hold the contents of six or seven Zip disks. You do the price comparison. A good price for a 100MB Zip disk is $10; a good price for a 600+ MB CD is $1. And $1 is less than $60. Furthermore, retrieving information from a CD is much faster than from a Zip disk. Zip disks, of course, still have their uses, such as backing up data that changes daily.
What else can you do with a CD-Writer. Well, you can duplicate audio (music) CD's if your second CD-ROM drive supports digital audio extraction. I think the newer CD-ROM drives probably all do, since my 1.5 year old 12 speed does. This feature is the primary reason for some I know to have bought a CD-Writer. Also, if you have the HP software mentioned below you can create a set of Disaster Recovery CD's that will restore your system to its current configuration.
As a test I used both the bundled Adaptec software Easy CD creator and the CD Copier programs to create copies of two audio CD’s. The CD copier program is very fast . It took only 21 minutes to make a copy of a music CD. The copying was done without first testing and was done at 4x speed.
Using the Easy CD Creator software at 2x without testing, it took 53 minutes to copy a different music CD. So it appears that copying at 4x with no testing produces good results. So why test? I believe you use the testing feature if you think there might be a problem with the copying.
In fact, the first time I tried to copy a music CD using the Easy CD Creator I set the testing option. It got down to the last .4 MB on the last track after having run for a little over one hour (at 2x) and froze. The computer was locked up. So much for testing on that CD. The second attempt to copy that CD was what I described above as using the CD Copier program with no testing at 4x which took 21 minutes and was successful
But I have very little interest in copying music CD’s. Possibly I will do a few for my car. I have more of an interest in getting the contents of my old LP records on CD. To do this, I first have to get the LP onto my computer’s hard drive as a wave (.wav) file or a collection of wave files. That means I need some sort of sound recorder program that will record in CD quality. The bundled software that came with the drive called Sonic Foundry Acid Music will do this, among other things (the other things it will do I haven’t had time to figure out yet). To simplify things, I simply recorded the entire side of the record as one wave file, not taking the time to do each song as a different file. Then I used the Easy CD Creator software to turn these two wave files into an audio CD, although the Acid program had a button to click on that was supposed to do the same thing. The process is fairly fast. The recording, of course, takes as long as it would take to listen normally to the record, but the transferring to CD goes much faster.
Another of the bundled programs is Adaptec DirectCD. DirectCD is a program that allows you to write files directly to a CD-Recordable (CD-R) or CD-ReWritable (CD-RW) disk in much the same way that you copy files to a floppy diskette or removable drive.
DirectCD lets you read and write your files directly to your CD with any software application that can read from and write to a drive letter. You can leave the CD in this format so that it acts as an extra drive for your computer, or you can close it and turn it into a CD that can be read by other systems.
You might note here that I haven’t mentioned using rewritable CD’s. Well I bought five such fellows, and my drive will use them, but with the price of the write-one-time (recordable) ones being so much cheaper, I haven’t yet found a good reason to try out the rewrite feature. I suppose they would be good for use in frequent backups of your data. If you were going to be backing up valuable files to CD every day, it certainly would make sense to use the rewritable media. Of course, I would still want to have a fairly recent copy of that same material on the write-one-time CD’s since I have more faith in the readability of this type of CD if I should need to load it on a different computer with a different CD drive.
Below is a listing of the software bundled with the drive. For some reason, my drive didn't have the Broderbund CD, but that didn't bother me since I will use Corel Draw for anything that I might have used the Broderbund program for. As a point of interest, I scanned in an image of one of the CD label stock pages, imported it into Corel Draw as a non-printing layer and then made text and graphics for my CD labels with it as a guide. When finished I printed out the page containing two labels on the label stock. For the jewel case inserts, I used the HP provided software, since after a CD had been made with Easy CD Creator, the software was already aware of the separate tracks and their times.
The one thing I definitely plan do but haven't yet had time is run the HP Disaster recovery program to make a sufficient number of CD's to back up my system.
The bundled software, as described by HP, is:
The site for the 820i is at http://www.hpcdwriter.com/products/fs_products.asp
A comparison of the various HP CD-Writer drives is at http://www.hpcdwriter.com/products/CompareSelect/compchart.htm. u