What is a, "PD Cartridge?"

[PretendHer]

Came across one of these while going thru some things of a deceased friend. Can anyone tell me what they are and what they are for?

Thanks.

 

[pm]

A quick search on google for "pd cartridge" turned up a bunch of entries for a "Panasonic Drive" which was a form of proprietary rewriteable CD drive that was released by Panasonic. Does that match with what it looks like?

For example, this quote from a 1996 issue of Byte magazine:

Panasonic's PD/CD-ROM LF-1000AB drive wears two hats: It can read and write to a 650-MB rewritable optical disk, and it can also read common quad-speed CD-ROMs--all in the same tray. For PD mode, you insert a cartridge into the phase-change drive's tray; for CDs, you remove the PD cartridge and simply drop a CD into the tray. Supported CD formats include Kodak Photo CD, Video CD, CD-DA, and CD-I FMV. This is the only drive we tested that supports standard CDs as well as a phase-change cartridge. Phase-change cartridges are nonmagnetic media that offer reliable long-term storage.

 

[RaynorWolfcastle]

Originally posted by: pm
A quick search on google for "pd cartridge" turned up a bunch of entries for a "Panasonic Drive" which was a form of proprietary rewriteable CD drive that was released by Panasonic.

[/quote]

Yep, I remember those. They were rewritable 650MB disks for the pre-CDRW era.

-Ice

 

[dbwillis]

Yeh, Ive got a PD drive at home, Compaq PD-1 drive..think its made by Toshiba...cant get the dang thing to write disks in win 2000 though...so far Ive only luck with NT4 writing the disks...maybe its the Compaq driver problem

 

[joohang]

PD = phase-change dual

It's an old school technology from pre-main stream CD-RW era. I used to want one pretty badly so read up a lot about it. Think of it as an ancient equivalent to writable DVD cartridges.

 

[weeber]

My family used to have 2 PD drives. What everyone has said previously is correct. It's a format introduced my Panasonic before CD-R/W drives were really affordable for the masses. I was able to talk my Dad into getting one because I didn't think CDRW was ever going to be reasonably priced (oops). They were pretty neat for their time, they held 650MB, and they didn't need a separate program to write to them, you could write/erase from them directly through Windows explorer. They were slow though, and if I remember right they needed a SCSI card to work. They didn't make them in IDE.

 

[Bluefront]

I'm still using PDrom drives. The ones I have are panasonic scsi, plus one panasonic ide. I've got them all working in XP now....no drivers necessary. The panasonic LF-D101 drive I have uses PDrom, CDrom, DVDrom, DVdram....quite an achivement for one drive. Only thing it cannot do is burn CDrom disks.