CHAPTER 13

If you must buy your own SCSI card for your recorder, follow these tips:
Tip
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■ Forget about ISA cards. Many new motherboards no longer include ISA slots, and even if they do,
the performance of the ISA bus presents a bottleneck that will seriously inhibit drive performance.
■ PCI or Cardbus SCSI works well. As discussed in Chapter 17, “I/O Interfaces from Serial and
Parallel to IEEE-1394 and USB,” PCI’s 32-bit data bus and 33MHz typical performance is far
faster than ISA’s 16-bit data bus and 8.33MHz typical performance. Cardbus is PCI for notebooks,
so the same benefits apply there as well.
A number of CD-R manufacturers offer high-performance PCI SCSI cards, including Adaptec, Amedia, Promise Tech, SIIG,
Tekram, DTC, and Advansys.
Buffer Underruns
Whenever a drive writes data to a CD-R/RW disc in either Disk at Once or Track at Once mode, it
writes to the spiral track on the CD, alternating on and off to etch the pattern into the raw media.
Because the drive can’t easily realign where it starts and stops writing like a hard drive can, after it
starts writing it must continue until it’s finished with the track or disc. Otherwise, the recording (and
disc if it is a CD-R) will be ruined. This means that the CD recording software, in combination with
your system hardware, must be capable of delivering a consistent stream of data to the drive while it’s
writing. To aid in this effort, the software uses a buffer that it creates on your hard disk to temporarily
store the data as it is being sent to the drive.
If the system is incapable of delivering data at a rate sufficient to keep the drive happy, you receive a
buffer underrun message and the recording attempt fails. The buffer underrun message indicates that
the drive had to abort recording because it ran out of data in its buffer to write to the CD. For many
years, this was the biggest problem people had when recording to CD-R/RW media.
And for many years, the best way to prevent buffer underruns was to either slow down the writing
speeds or have a large buffer in the recording drive, as well as to use the fastest interface and reading
drive as possible. Nobody wants to write at lower speeds (otherwise, why buy a fast drive?), so buffer
sizes grew as did the interface speeds. Still, it was possible to get a buffer underrun if, for example, you
tried browsing Web pages or doing other work while burning a disc.
Buffer Underrun Protection
Sanyo was the first to develop a technology that eliminates buffer underruns once and for all. They
call the technology Burn (buffer underrun) Proof, which sounds a little confusing (some people
thought it prevented any writing on discs), but in practice it has proven to be excellent.
After Sanyo, several other companies have developed similar and compatible technology with various
names. The most common you’ll see are
■ BURN-Proof, from Sanyo
■ JustLink, from Ricoh
■ Waste-Proof, from Yamaha
Buffer underrun protection technology involves having a special chipset in the drive, which monitors
the drive buffer. When it anticipates that a buffer underrun might occur (the buffer is running low on