Date: Wed, 16 May 2001 00:02:12 +0100 (BST) From: Andrew Gordon <arg@arg1.demon.co.uk> To: Neil Long <neil.long@computing-services.oxford.ac.uk> Cc: <freebsd-stable@freebsd.org> Subject: Re: portable CD-R or CD-RW? Message-ID: <20010515233355.V14487-100000@server.arg.sj.co.uk> In-Reply-To: <E14zmx6-0000ri-00@ratbert.oucs.ox.ac.uk>
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On Tue, 15 May 2001, Neil Long wrote: > > Anyone running stable on a laptop know if there is support for writing to > a portable CD-R or CD-RW drive? I was wondering about the USB interface and > drives such as the Iomega product. I have been using the Freecom "IQ" products for a long time (back to fairly early FreeBSD 3.x) with good success. They have a mix-and-match set of drives and interfaces: the drives have a 26-pin D connector which is essentially an IDE interface crammed into fewer pins; there are then PCMCIA, USB and parallel interfaces to plug into this. The PCMCIA interface is the one you want: the USB wasn't supported on FreeBSD last time I checked, and in any case its performance is worse (and under Windows the drivers are flaky - but then what USB drivers aren't?). On the drive side, I originally had a full-size CD-RW, but later upgraded to the "Traveller" drive (this is a CD-RW in a case about the size of a typical laptop CD drive, and much lighter than the full-size one). While the traveller drive is ideal for travelling (!), the full-size drive has come in extremely handy on occasion: it's actually just a 5.25" case with buffer circuitry to turn the IDE interface back into a standard 40-pin connector, and then a standard desktop size drive in it. You can thus take out the supplied IDE CD-RW and substitute any IDE peripheral that you want to run on your laptop - I've run DVD drives, big hard drives, better-than-original-spec CDRW drives as the occasion demands. > I would be mainly interested in copying gziped dd images of filesystems > for forensic type analysis. > > Also interested if there is a stabl-ish -current where a Cardbus scsi > pcmcia solution might be feasible. I don't know about cardbus (I don't run -current on my laptops), but PCMCIA SCSI has been known to work. My first portable CD-RW solution was an Adaptec 1460B card plus an external SCSI CD-RW drive. I ditched this primarily because the drive was in a built-like-a-tank steel case, and I have enough trouble with the weight of my hand luggage as it is. [Actually, my first portable CD-RW solution was a full-height tower case PC, one of the feet off which was last seen under a train at Paddington station. I was highly motivated to investigate laptop CD-RW drives after that trip...] To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message
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