On Wednesday, Jun 23, 2004, at 09:58 Australia/Sydney, Bob Nestor wrote:

> On Jun 22, 2004, at 12:18 PM, Hauke Fath wrote:
>
>> At 18:37 Uhr -0500 21.6.2004, Frederick Bruckman wrote:
>>> No? I did a little experimenting, and found that the old Apple 300i
>>> can read Memorex 48X CD-R media (burned at 24X for good measure), but
>>> not TDK CD-RW.
>>
>>> From my experience, drives older than about 1998 apparently are not 
>>> able to
>> read CD-RW. I've seen this with
>>
>> - the cdrom drive in a Quadra 650
>> - the cdrom drive of a Thinkpad 380D (~1997)
>> - a Philips 8x SCSI drive (~1998) with Windows 95.
>
> A few years ago a PC support guy told me a good rule of thumb to use 
> is "if the drive read speed is 12x or better it will probably support 
> reading CDRW".  That rule has proven to be pretty reliable.

Good rule, except when dealing with laptops, and other portable CD
drives. The 24x in my ~1999 PowerBook G3 Wallstreet doesn't like
CD-RWs.

Cheers,
--
stix