"pb0aia@iaehv.nl" "Kees Stravers" wrote:

>If the RRD40 is the big external top-loading external drive, the same
>one as the very first cd-rom drive made by Philips, (a picture of which
>I have on my page http://www.iae.nl/users/pb0aia/cm/sroom.html) the
>CM110, then it very well can be slower than 1x! I have 8 of these drives
>hooked up to my bbs, and while they are very solid and dependable, they
>are also incredebly slow, more like 1/4x. Throughput is in the order
>of 35k.

Looking at the (nice BTW) picture, that must be the RRD50 (or rather, the RRD50 
must have been Digital's badged version of the Philips drive). The respective 
user's guides rate the RRD40 and RRD50 and RRD42 all at nearly 1x (150-170KB/s) 
but the RRD40 certainly feels much slower than that! I can't fire up the RRD50 
because I don't have the appropriate cable, however given that it has an average 
access time of 2 seconds, I'm not sure I want to! (For comparison, the RRD40 and 
RRD42 both have average access times in the 1/2-second region). The RRD40 used a 
strange "caddy" that I've never seen anywhere else, the RRD42 used the normal CD 
caddy. 

Antonio

Antonio Carlini                            Mail: carlini@marvin.enet.dec.com
DECnet-Plus for OpenVMS Engineering
Digital Equipment Corporation              Worton Grange, Reading, England