Yamaha drive irritants
While I went through this entire process, the Yamaha
CDR-100 performed almost perfectly. It did what it was
told, had a nice collection of lights (disc, read,
write, x2, x4) to show me what it was doing, and
generally didn't cause any trouble. No, the few things
I didn't like were more things that irritated me rather
then being regular problems. First off, it's a caddy
drive; I hate them and normally buy nothing but sliding
tray drives, but I can live with this one (since the
usage on the recorder is much less then that of my
usual CD-ROM drive). Another annoyance is that the
drive doesn't appear to talk with software properly
when it doesn't have a disc avialable. Normally, a CD-
ROM that you try and access that doesn't have a disc in
it will immediately return an error saying the drive
isn't ready. That didn't always happen with some of
the software I used with the drive (like the DOS EZ-
SCSI drivers that Adaptec produces for my SCSI card).
What ended up happening with the problem software is
that the system would hang until I put a disc in; this
was most annoying (and first caught my attention) with
installation programs that go out and query every disk
drive on the system to find out things like how much
space they have on them. I think this is related to
another problem, which is that software that queries
what type of drive this is get told that it is a WORM
(write once read multiple, if I remember correctly)
drive. While this is technically correct, the
different media type means that most software doesn't
believe this to be a CD-ROM drive, and accordingly
won't let you read files, give the drive a drive
letter, or play music CDs in it. This is fine for me;
after all, since I try and keep wear and tear off the
$1000 CD-R and on the CD-ROM that I could replace for
$100 instead, I use the cheap drive for reading and
music playing whenver possible. But if you need those
capabilities, there are supposed to be patches
available for Win 95 and NT that correct this "problem"
(the latest version of DOS EZ-SCSI talks to the WORM
drives--if yours doesn't, there's an upgrade patch
available from Adaptec). I really
don't care myself if any of my OSes can talk to the
drive, all I care about is that I can write to it,
which isn't impacted as long as I've got Easy-CD Pro.
What is probably the first weird things you'll notice
about the drive is that whenever you turn your computer
on, or finish writing a CD, the drive will eject its
contents. This is especially annoying to me because I
have a big file-server style tower case, with a closing
door over the main panel to keep wandering fingers away
from the buttons and switches (anyone who has ever
turned their computer off by accident by hitting the
switch unintentionally will see the value in this, and
parents with kids tall enough to hit the power switch
don't even need to be told why this is a good feature).
If I close the case front door, the Yamaha can't eject,
and it gets caught in this half-ejected limbo where it
won't do anything. I can't get the thing to take the
old disc back, it won't release the old one; it's an
incredible pain all around, and I can't get it to work
again without killing the power. Sure, it would nice
if all these things were fixed, but it's not like any
of them really get in my way. If the worst thing I
have to say about a piece of electronic equipment is
that I have to be careful to use it properly, I
certainly can't complain too much about that.