[ILUG] ide cd writer

[Michael Conry]

I recently did two separate installs of ide-cdrewriters (both Ricoh
MP7083A's), and put up some rough notes:
http://mconry.ucd.ie/~mconry/cdrw_help.html 
It is pretty much procedural (i.e. a recipe for how to do it, not lots of
tech background or anything), and a bit rough, but might be helpful.

If nothing else, it gives links to better docs ;-)

Regarding bus, it is definitely better to have the drive on a separate bus
to the one you are burning from, but it makes little difference on a modern
system, AFAICS. I put both cdrw drives (two separate machines of course) on
the same bus as the cdr. The ide bus can only run one device at a time, which
might be expected to cause problems (Nero burning software (windoze) insists
on doing a dry-run the first time you try to do an on-the-fly copy cd-to-cd)
but since your cdr can read probably at 32x, or 40x, and you are only
burning at maybe 8x (on my model) there isn't actually any real problem
keeping the buffer full.

I think one is best to put the cdrw on the same bus as the cdr. If you want
to use mkisofs on the fly to make your filesystem, and then directly write
it to the cdrw, there is going to be lots of disk io on the hdd (reading
directories, and working), and lots of writing to disk.

even if i am wrong in my thinking, the practice works just fine ;-)

Also, as was kinda mentioned by Paul i think, it is not a bad idea to make
your ide-cdr behave as a scsi device too. No drawbacks afaics, and some
programs like cdparanoia prefer it as there is supposed to be better error
catching and the like. Then, you can leave ide-cd module out altogether.

hope this helps
mick