[conspire] Last Year's Supercomputer

[Edmund J. Biow]

 > Ed, I doff my virtual hat.  You've just walked away with the Maximum
 > Effectiveness Through Careful Cheap Bastardhood award.
 
I'm honored, Suh!
 
 > Just a note:  I'm picky, but I'm not spendthrift:  Last time I bought a
 > CD burner, I waited until I was going to attend a Robert Austin Computer
 > Show at the Oakland Convention Center, and found out who has a good
 > deal.  One of the vendors had a Ricoh SCSI burner for just over $100, so
 > I took it.
 >
 > One of the benefits of buying the Ricoh, Yamaha, or Toshiba units is
 > that they're built to last, too.  My drive is now really slow by modern
 > standards, but that's because it hasn't died like the cheapos.
 >
 > My point is that, rationally, the cost of a component should be measured
 > in dollars _per year of productive use_.  Something that's cheap 
today but
 > useful only for a year is no bargain compared to something with twice
 > the price but useful for five years.

Of the dozens of IDE burners I've installed, besides the Imation with 
the freezing problem, I've only had one really go pecker-up on me, my 
first, for which I actually paid the lordly sum of $180 after 
rebate.  It was a Yamaha sold by Memorex, which stopped burning CD-Rs 
reliably one year & a few days after I bought it.  Last year I collected 
$50 from a class action law suit (I could have elected to get a 
replacement for my 4x4x6 burner instead!)
https://www.classactionamerica.com/cases/case.asp?cid=1673&categoryID=3 
<https://www.classactionamerica.com/cases/case.asp?cid=1673&categoryID=3>
With the $50 I could have bought a nice, modern 32X burner.
BTW, the 6 year old Memorex CRW-1622 unit still works making CD-RW 
backups and as a straight CD drive in a friend's computer in 
Guaunajuato, MX.  Reuse, recycle...
 
I try to buy dirt cheap, but necessarily bottom of the barrel.  Those 
$10-$30 after-rebate burners you see advertised from big box stores are 
generally sold by companies that rebadge drives from a variety of makers 
(e.g. Verbatim, Cendyne, Pacific Digital, etc.)  Often you can deduce 
from the serial numbers on the boxes which drives are relatively higher 
quality (Lite-On, Acer) and which are to be shunned (BTC, Optorite).  
Here's a not atypical thread mentioning how you can get a 52x burner and 
actually make a little pocket change in the process:
http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview.cfm?catid=40&threadid=1062018&FTVAR_MSGDBTABLE 
<http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview.cfm?catid=40&threadid=1062018&FTVAR_MSGDBTABLE>=
Of course, this type of insanity has its own opportunity costs 
(monitoring the deals forums, getting up Sunday morning so you can be at 
the store when they open at 10 AM and have the widest variety of drives 
from which to choose ).
 
On the economic front, remember that if you go SCSI you also have to 
shell out for a SCSI card and sometimes for cables.  Also, according to 
Pricewatch the cheapest SCSI burner is a TEAC 12x10x32 for about 
$113 after tax and shipping & the prices climb very rapidly from 
there.     You can get an Acer 48X drive to your door for ~$38, no 
rebate, about a third of the price.  And you'll almost never find a 
mail-in rebate deal on a SCSI part.  So even if the IDE burner dies in a 
year or two, the way tech prices drop one could probably get a faster 
replacement drive for less than half of the money saved by not going 
SCSI & still have enough money left over for a "pretty good weekend in 
Vegas," in the immortal words of Slim Pickens in Dr. Strangelove.
 
Moreover, for SCSI you also need an extra PCI slot unless you have 
onboard SCSI (only on very pricey server motherboards).  That isn't a 
big deal now, when typical motherboards come with integrated audio, LAN 
and often video, Firewire, S-ATA, RAID, etc., as well as 3-6 PCI slots, 
but older Socket 7 and Slot 1 boards often only had 3 PCI slots and a 
similar number of ISA slots, and you needed at least one slot for video 
and possibly others for NIC and sound.  Sometimes even if you have an 
extra slot, mustering up an interrupt can be a problem.
 
These days IDE "Burn-Proof" or its kindred works quite well with 
half-way decent media.  My cousin was really surprised that we could 
burn 3 copies of Mandrake 9.1 under RH8 with X-CD-Roast while surfing 
the net and downloading the other ISOs with gFTP without a buffer 
underrun, even with a several year old Yamaha 8x burner without 
Burn-Proof. 
 
Likewise, these days 7,200 RPM IDE hard drives have performance that is 
much closer to that of SCSI drives than it used to be (reliability is, 
perhaps, another matter entirely), and the new S-ATA technology is very 
promising.  I saw a Seagate 80 gig  serial ATA drive at Fry's for $120 
yesterday vs. $160 for a 74 GB Maxtor Quantum 80 pin SCSI drive (again, 
from Pricewatch).  Both drives have comparable data transfer, but the 
price of S-ATA is dropping like a stone, & performance in increasing 
apace.  However for me HD reliability is much more important than for a 
CD-RW drive.  If a burner were to crap out, I'd just toggle on a 
different machine, while having a hard drive die oftne means losing data 
and having to reinstall an OS.    Good SCSI drives often come with 4-5 
year warranties, while last year most makers went from 3 year to 1 year 
warranties with their IDE drives (you can still get 3 year warranties on 
some of the higher end models with the 8 MB buffer).  And SCSI has 
better seek times. 
 
On the other paw, those 10,000-15,000 RPM SCSI drives can be amazingly 
annoying, with their high-pitched whines.  I recently fixed up a dual 
Pentium II, dual 4.3 gig SCSI system that I'd been given for another 
friend & I could barely stand to be in the same room as the thing & its 
deafening array of case fans.  I completed some of the work on the 
system with VNC from downstairs, but luckily for him, the guy who now 
uses it doesn't leave it running all the time.
 
-Here's where I'd have a cleaver sig if I had a brain in my head,
Ed