Problems with Acer 24x ATAPI

Not all CD drives are created equal, and neither and ATAPI interefaces. I
tried hooking up quite a few different ATAPI drives to a StarMax. I had a
bus analyser to help me and basically some mechanisms are not compatable
with the Mac ATA implimentation. (Or more properly Mac ATA is not
compatable with a lot of drives.) The bus will hang for periods from a few
ms to several seconds at a time.

I tried an earlier Acer drive, it was one of the incompatable ones. It was
also petty low quality and I would have trusted it if it did work. Not all
drives are created equal, just because a drive has a higher 'X' rating
doesn't mean it will actually be faster. In terms of how fast the Finder
runs the access time for the drive is much more important.

The 8x drive which came with StarMax's is pretty average in this respect. I
wouldn't expect the Acer drive to be much good in this respect. With that
and the bus hangs I would expect to get much performance out of the drive.
It isn't a problem with the driver, the System ATA software needs some
work. (I doubt Apple has much interest in this as it works with the drives
they supply.)

--
Barry
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(Obsolete sig deleted).