Notes on Using Third Party CD-R Drives on SGI's

Personal Experiences

We used a CD-R on an Indigo2 R10000 running IRIX 6.2 for a while back in 1997 and have burned over a dozen good CD's so far. The first one was a bust, but aren't they always. We had to figure everything out on the first one before getting the good ones.

For all the CD-R's, make sure one gets the lastest firmware. Earlier models of the Yamaha 100's and most other CD-R's have problems with both SCSI sync negotiations and SCSI disconnects. A properly functioning drive will handle both correctly. The Yamaha 100's and I think a Sony model are the only drives I've heard of that do both of these properly and thus will work reliably with SGI's. We purchased a Yamaha CDE 100 II and Elektroson's OEM version of GEAR software from Inline Corp.. The OEM version of the software we received acted a little flaky under IRIX 6.2, but once configured properly, it worked ok.

There are TWO version of GEAR, the stripped down OEM version and the full blown MM version. We first recieved the OEM version due to some confusion. When talking to Elektroson, they assume there is only one version, the full blown MM version. The 3rd party distributors only knew of the OEM version and assumed THAT was the only version. Elektroson told me about all these nice features GEAR has and when the software actually arrived, it didn't have most of them. It took about a month to get everything straightend out and another $350 for the `upgrade' to the MM version. The MM version still had some problems, but it worked better than the OEM version.

With the OEM version and a `virtual' image set up, we were only able to use our 4x CD-R at 2x speed. Both `test' modes of the software said 4x would just barely work, but when we actually tried to burn a CD at 4x, the transfer rate was too slow. With the MM version and after talking to an Elektroson support person, we were able to get the drive to burn at the 4x rate. We made two major changes:

  1. Turned on 1 memory buffer and set it to 2MB
  2. Used a `physical' image set up.

I'm not sure which one helped the most or if it was the combination of the two, but both these changes were MORE than adequate to get the drive to run at the 4x rate. This version was very flaky in that it often would NOT let us make a `physical' image, even though we had MORE than enough disk space for the image.

After several complaints to Elektroson, we finally received an upgrade to the 3.32 version of Multi Media GEAR. We are now able to create `physical' images with out any problems. We were even able to burn a CD with the all the source files residing on a MO disc. It still has some minor problems, but once one has everything set up correctly, they aren't that noticeable.

Here are some CD-R related links:

Andy McFadden's CD-Recordable FAQ: http://www.cdrfaq.org/

Jörg Schilling's CDRecord software: http://www.fokus.gmd.de/research/cc/glone/employees/joerg.schilling/private/cdrecord.html


The CD-Info CD/DVD FAQ Link Page: http://www.cd-info.com/CDIC/Technology/CD-R/FAQ.html

CDio Writing/Reading CDs and Recommended CD writers FAQ Carsten Koch, July, 1996:http://viz.tamu.edu/pub/sgi/hardware/cdrom/cd-writers

My other SGI 3rd party hardware lists:

Working CD-ROM Drive Poll , Tape Drives,
Hard Disks, Joysticks,
Magneto Opticals, Memory,

CDR's (Writeable CD-ROM's)

If you have any additions, corrects, or updates to the above information, please email me at: blbates@vigyan.com, thanks.

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Last update: May 14, 2002