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Should I Worry About Mt. Rainier Support?

Posted by Cliff on from the esoteric-hardware-issues dept.

MBCook asks: "I've been thinking of buying a writable DVD drive, specifically the Sony DRX500LX, an external CD-RW and DVD+/-RW drive. I need a drive to be able to store files on and make DVDs. It needs to be external so that I can share it between my desktop and my laptop, and it needs Firewire. The external version of the Sony drive seems perfect. It's fast, has very good reviews, and supports BOTH the +RW and -RW formats.The thing that I'm not sure about is that it lacks Mt. Rainier support (known as CD-MRW). Should I worry about this?"

"Now if you're not familiar with it the idea is to make it so you can use CD-RWs as floppies (same as DirectCD) only it's supports things like defect correction (instead of making the OS do that work) and eliminate formatting times. But the drive doesn't support writing to the format. Is this something that could be added in a firmware upgrade? Also, it looks like Mt. Rainier is also supposed to be for DVD+RW discs. Is this true?

Mt. Rainier drives have been on the market for a while now. It's not too common because it requires 3rd party software if the OS doesn't support it natively (I don't think it will be in Windows until Longhorn, and it looks like there are patches for the Linux kernel).

Can it be added with a firmware upgrade? Have a better drive suggestion? Can it be added with just software? Will it be a moot issue because of recordable DVD drives?"

1 of 20 comments (clear)

  1. Firmware upgrades... by shaitand · · Score: 3, Informative

    I used to work for sony, and while pretty much anything with a laser in it made by sony is reasonable quality, the price is almost always too high and the support is god aweful. Do not count on Sony adding too much in terms of functionality via firmware upgrades. Generally sony releases a newer drive with the feature or doesn't release it instead. Remember when they released the new set of clie handhelds with the improved display... well the actual hardware in the display was identical to the previous model, the only difference was a firmware upgrade.... they based the entire new model on a firmware upgrade.