using CD-RW as a regular CD-ROM? Okay or not?

[Telemonius]

i wasn't sure b/c i had an older ricoh 4x burner that died after using it as a regular cd-rom for a few months.

have newer drives corrected this? it seems like they have, as they advertise the newer burners as all-in-one drives. like the tdk velocd burners, which i've seen with the caption 'a one drive solution.'

 

[NelsonMuntz]

It should be okay, but I perfer to use my DVD or CD-ROM drive for that kind of thing because they are cheaper. The more you use the equipment the shorter its lifespan. Two months on that Ricoh seems a little extreme though.

 

[VBboy]

If it has "CD" and "drive" in its name, you may use it as a CD-playback device.

 

[Telemonius]

yeah, i wasn't too thrilled about that ricoh when it died, but the guy who i bought it from replaced it for free. did ricoh get out of the burner business? i haven't seen anything from them in a while.

 

[damocles]

Ricoh are still pretty big in the business, with their Justlink drives (good drives too)

You can generally use a burner as a drive, but it is handy to have a CDROM drives for direct CD copying, considering you can pick them up pretty cheap these days

 

[igowerf]

I prefer having a separate DVD or CD ROM drive because CD-RW drives are generally much slower.

 

[Noriaki]

CDRW drives are fine for CD reading use, but even if they are 24x or 32x or even 40x they tend to have pretty piss poor seek times so they don't make terribly good CD readers.

 

[Mark0999]

CD-Rom drives are less than $30! Save your burner for burning CDs and use the CD-Rom for everything else.