On Sunday 21 December 2003 05:27 pm, Tom Emerson wrote:
basically, "which one(s) work?"
I 've been shopping for one for my dad for christmas [but since he's running windows 2k, "compatability" isn't a big issue...] and found a pretty good price on a sony DRU-510a, so I got him that one. I'm curious, though, if there is any/good linux support for this drive [so I can watch for it at an "after christmas sale" for myself :) ]
AS I was considering which one to get, some "guy off the street" started giving his unsolicited advice which seemed to vaguely dis the sony unit and mildly praise a pioneer one [which was about $10 cheaper, actually -- I'll get to why I didn't go with that in a moment] saying something about downloadable "hacks" that improve the pioneer drive. While I don't recall him saying it directly, after he left someone commented on the fact that he said he worked for pioneer... [hence the first red flag as to his "believability"] As it turns out, the sony drive has a larger buffer *8mb vs 2mb) and some other "bundled software" that I think is more appropriate for what my dad will be using this for, so I stayed with the sony unit for him.
I forgot to ask him how compatible these drives are with "non-windows" systems, so I'm asking here :) =============
Tom, I think you would likely find either unit to work ok with Linux. I believe someone else asked about the same Sony unit here already, so you might search the mail list archives on what was said then. I think many here probably have the Pioneer units, DVD drives at least, and the only problem I have heard with those was the bios problem that wouldn't allow it to read 8.1 or 8.2 SuSE dvds. A simple bios update managed to fix that problem with just a few of the models. Lee -- --- KMail v1.5.4 --- SuSE Linux Pro v9.0 --- Registered Linux User #225206 On any other day, that might seem strange...