On Wed, 24 Mar 1999 15:44:25 -0500 (EST), you wrote: >> Also, does linux handle the cd-rw's? If so, are they worth the extra money >> to get? > >IMO, no. A CD-RW blank costs upwards of 30$ while a CD-R blank costs 1$ >to 1.80$ so you would need to blank a disc about 30 times before it's >worthwhile cost-wise (and that's not taking into account the added cost of >the drive). For my purposes, if I want to delete a disc, I'll just break >it over my knee or use it as a coaster. >
I beg to differ. CD-RW already came down in price, and you can find $10 ones even at CompUSA and $5 ones through mail order. Also you might heard that CD-RW can be 'reburned' 'only' 700 times or so. As it turned out many will last over 1000 burns. CD-RW adds much more flexibility to your setup: 1) you can use it as temporary collection 'bin' before you commit to CD-R. a place to dump, you know. You can organize files better. 2) you can make your temporary 'distribution' of debian. for example I got hamm CD from cheapbytes, but I only use maybe 500 packages out of 2000+, and for somethings, such as LILO*, I use my own binary. So I copy only the ones I need and replace stuffs that needs replacing. The service packages that gets downloaded can be put in later. once hamm came out I start over again from scratch saving a disk. actually something like this is much more ehh.. useful for Win95, 95a, 98, 98 second edition etc... 3) you can use it as a backup device. cd-rw is not the most ideal one but it works and media is cheaper than many tapes. 4) you can try all sort of medieval stuffs with your CD-RW ^_^ without worring about making a coaster. I had rather exceptional luck, so far anyway, with my Nomai 680RW which is just rebadged Ricoh 1600S. I got it for $300 last January 1998! Since than Nomai stopped operation in USA and if this thing breaks down I will have to return it to France to get fixed, but so far it's working just fine. I can honestly say that I got my money's worth out of this thing already. Others who bought CD-RW at the time will take a bit more time to recoup the cost, but I think most will eventually. I think you can get genuine richo 1600s for $350 or less now... get SCSI one especially if you already have IDE CD-ROM >HTH. > >-Dano
