Garry Garrett's Homepage Garry Garrett's Homepage Don't forget SCSI cables, terminators, etc.
CDROMs come in 2 types: tray mounted and caddy mounted. You have probably seen tray mounted ones, they have a "tray" that sticks out of the CDROM drive (when you push the eject button), and you set your CDROM in the tray. It may be a thin piece of plastic that the CDROM rests on, or it may be a thicker tray that actually has a spindle on it that you push the CDROM onto. The other, less common type is caddy mounted. With this type of cdrom, you get a "caddy", which is a case, slightly thinner than the jewel case that CDROMs come in, that has a shutter on the back side (like a floppy disk's shutter). The top is usually clear plastic and is hinged - you squeeze on the tray's sides at the front to release the top and open it.
The theory of caddy mounted drives is that you will purchase extra caddies, one for each of the CDROMs that you commonly use, plus a couple of extras for the odd CDROM here or there, and that you will leave the CDROM in the caddy. It's always protected; you are never handling the CDROM itself (great for the handicaped or small children or family members who aren't careful when handling CDROMs, etc.). In practice, most companies and individuals who bought caddy mounted systems were too cheap to buy extra caddies (one usually comes with the drive). Opening a caddy and changing the CDROM within is a 2 handed process (you can put them in 1 handed, but taking them out is more difficult). If you don't buy extra caddies, caddy mounted drives are harder to use than tray mounted ones. If you do buy extra caddies, then caddy mounted ones are much easier and safer to use.
The reason that I see a need to pontificate on the virtues of caddy mounted drives is that I am morning their slow and painful death. Because people are too cheap to buy the caddies, caddy mounted drives have been dubbed "undesirable" by consumers, and many companies no longer make them. You won't find any of the latest high speed CDROM systems that are caddy mounted (admittedly, there may be technical reasons for this that prevent caddy mounted systems from spinning so fast), and certainly no DVD or CD-R (there were a couple of these, but no new ones) or CD-RW caddy mounted systems. Who truely suffers in all of this is the handicaped. They no longer have the option of having a caddy mounted systems. Parents, if your children have games and educational software on CDROM, insist on buying caddy mounted drives, buy extra caddies, and leave your kid's software in the caddies away from sticky fingers. I enourage all consumers to ask for caddy mounted drives, if nothing else, so that manufacters will still make them so that they are available for the disabled. Even if you don't intend to buy a caddy mounted system, ask the sales person if they have them. Inquiries might be enough to keep manufacturers making them, even if it is only in limited quantities.
I am a big fan of caddy mounted (I insisted on buying one for my computer, though had to settle for an 8x drive), I'd buy a caddy mounted stereo if I could. Let's not let caddies be yet another superior technology that was killed off by people using it incorrectly and then bitching about how it "didn't work right".
