cd-rw drives on slower pentium II's

[mkb12]

I have an old compaq deskpro 233mhz pentium II computer and I am considering buying a 16x cd-rw drive, but I am concerned that my computer is too old and it wont burn the CD's correctly. Can anybody give me some advice?

[BuddhaTB]

I should work fine. Just make sure your system has atleast 128MB of RAM and the CD-RW drive uses some type of buffer-underrun protection scheme.

[mkb12]

the only thing is the requirements for the drive was 300mhz since I only have 233 i was thinkin it would not work at all, even at a low speed like 8 or 4x.???

[BuddhaTB]

Brand and model number?
I personally would give it a try. If it doesn't work out for you, just return it back.

[mkb12]

I dont know the model # because I the drive is still in the mail, but it is a teac 16x10x30x

[blakerwry]

The system requirements for ATA and ATAPI drives are crap.. really...

You ahvea pentium II processor, so you probably have a 440BX or FX chipset... so your computer can handle DMA and UDMA mode 2 operation... this is the max speed for most CD drives... so therefore, i think you could probably even go upto a 32 or 40x burner and be fine as long as you aren't doing anything "on the fly".

It's the "on the fly" operations (performing multiple things simultaneoulsy) that require a faster CPU... examples of "on the fly" would be converting MP3's to CDDA and burning the disk simultaneoulsy... or... reading the contents of one CD and simultaneoulsy burning it to another CD...

Even with a Pentium II you might not have a problem with these things... if you notice a problem then you can always bump the speed down to 4 or 8x...

No matter what, i would get a faster/newer drive... it will almost certainly work better than an older/slower drive despite your system specs. This is mainly due to BURN Proof and other tecniques to ensure successful burns.

[Dartman]

I ran a 12x on a Pentium 133 I think it was with 64 meg under windows 3.1 and it worked just fine, no burnproof either. It was a SCSI drive though. In the old days that was the way to go, let the controler do the work.
My first was a 4260 yamaha and it was on a 486 dx120 for a while and it worked well also.

[mkb12]

ty