What is a CD tower?

[bupkus]

What is a CD tower and what is it's basic construction?

 

[MasterHoss]

You mean a CD tower ... like something that holds your CDs vertically?

 

[bupkus]

Yah, like a computer that holds 4 CD drives.

 

[LordMorpheus]

buy a server tower case with lots of open cd size bays.

buy as many Cd burners or drives as there are bays to hold em.


you will probably need to get a pci card with ide conections .. .. your master/primary IDE needs an HD unless you do a boot from RAID thing . . . which leaves you only 3 connectors for cds. so get some cards to get extra conenctions.

other than that, it should be just put it together . .. wait, you also need big powersupply.

 

[DeschutesCore]

CD Towers have two modes. In the early days of BBS's, CD Towers allowed you to use multiple CD-ROM drives to store music(MOD, S3m, IT, etc.) on one drive, shareware (Windows 3.1, DOS, etc.) on another, and more store on other drives. Hard drives weren't cheap and storing all the data was much easier on towers. Most BBSs rotated the CD's so each day of the week offered new content.

More modern CD-R towers allow for mastering discs, and tools such as CloneCD were originally designed for this mode.

Both setups run on a SCSI-I or SCSI-II chain, and had their own BIOS and boot configuration. The last tower I saw in commercial format a year ago weighed around 40 lbs. and was in the area of 40 bucks used. It used a Centronix-50 to 25-pin cable and worked in DOS.

DC

 

[bupkus]

Thanks for the info. I guess I can either get an ide card or go scsi. My intent was to use the tower as an application server for educational software so kids on a network can use the CDs without needing to touch them. One problem, I've never done this before and the most I've done with a network was share files, not applications. What do I need to do?

Hmmm, it seems I've morphed myself to another forum topic.
Can I use W98 or W2K Pro?