ValuStor 1045-XX-IDE/Parallel Port CD Drive Transformer

Emedia Professional, April, 1998 by Ron Gustavson

As most PCs have come with CD-ROM drives for the last few years, and most PC users tend to upgrade either whole systems or parts of them in any given year, there are many 2X, 4X, and 6X IDE ATAPI CD-ROM drives unused in the home or office.

ValuStor, Inc., of San Jose, California, has the perfect solution for these unused CD-ROM drives--one that will provide any office machine or notebook with a portable CD-ROM drive. ValuStor's 1045-XX-IDE/Parallel Port CD Drive Transformer creates a portable plug-and-play CD-ROM device for any PC, and even provides a convenient audio player when used with headphones.

And how is all of this accomplished? Take some sheet metal for casing, add some standard power supply components, data cables, and the bit of audio cable and jack, and mix with the increasingly common IDE-to-parallel port connection software drivers. At $89, ValuStor offers a much cheaper means of adding CD-ROM drive portability to a system--assuming you have an internal IDE CD-ROM drive kicking around, of course.

By the way, those with the odd hard drive not being put to use will also find some value in ValuStor's line of products. ValuStor's IDE/ Parallel Port Hard Drive Transformer creates--transforms, one may assume the company might say--surplus hard drives by supplying the hardware, case, and connections for backups and disaster recovery, as well as a redundant or portable data archive. As users upgrade to inexpensive, larger IDE drives, many perfectly good hard drives become orphaned by the limited space in users' PCs, or just the hassle associated with installing a smaller drive as slave to a new large master.

THE TRANSFORMATIVE POWER OF A SMART, SIMPLE IDEA

The ValuStor IDE/Parallel Port CD Drive Transformer is valuable for its functionality, although not necessarily for its speed. Depending on the type of parallel port, data transfers will vary. A 6X ATAPI drive plugged into a recent EPP parallel port might yield 6X transfers, but this isn't assured. In testing, a TEAC 8X CD-58 drive only achieved 521 KB/sec transfers, or 3.5X equivalence, using the ValuStor Transformer. This disappointing result was probably due to the type of parallel port used in that test; a standard parallel port will likely yield 300 KB/sec transfers, while an Enhanced Parallel Port (EPP)--the best option-should offer transfers of up to 1000KB/sec.

But in the real world, even among EPP-equipped computers, such theoretical top speeds may not be available. Although parallel port connections for CD-ROM drives have come a long way since their inception, where half-speed of standard 1X was the original norm, the claims of data transfer rates for this kind of connection are routinely more generous compared with results in the field. This state reflects less on ValuStor and other parallel port implementors' veracity, perhaps, than on the many factors that make the difference between a perfectly tweaked system and one a normal user is likely to have. The BIOS, for example, where there may be options of EPP 1.7, EPP 1.9, or EPP/ECP, can greatly affect performance, and some experimenting will have to be done to achieve the best performance with any particular machine, including, in some cases, BIOS upgrades.

The purchaser of a portable CD-ROM has to balance price, flexibility, and performance. A PCMCIA-connected CD-ROM drive will likely offer better performance than a parallel port-connected CD-ROM drive, especially in terms of data transfer speeds. The TEAC PortaCD 10X, for example, is a recently released PCMCIA drive that claims 1.5MB/sec and tested out at 1121 KB/sec (or a little under 8X), but then, the price for this drive, like many other PCMCIA devices in its class, is nearly $300. And PCMCIA devices, of course, are limited to use with notebook computers with such built-in buses and those still very rare desktops that have a PCMCIA card port installed. Also, PCMCIA CD-ROM drives may end up competing with other-PCMCIA devices by using up the limited number of PCMCIA slots. External SCSI CD-ROM drives are another option, but only for Macintosh Powerbooks. These drives will not fit most notebooks, which raises the issue of the cost of upgrading office PCs with SCSI adapters.

Users aren't turning to ValuStor for the fastest CD-ROM drive, but rather as an inexpensive way to reuse surplus CD-ROM drives. And installing an IDE CD-ROM drive into the Transformer is easier than installing one into the PC case. All connections are accessible and easily made, with the CD-ROM drive's 40-pin IDE data cable connecting with the ValuStor data cable, the drive's power connector to the supplied power, and analog audio cable with the case's audio plug. Like any computer hardware effort, there are both easier and harder ways of doing something. One hint: if you pass the power and audio wires underneath the data cable, the Transformer case cover will slide on more easily.

Once every connection is made, slide on the cover, secure it with six screws, and plug the drive into a wall outlet and to the parallel port. The installation is so easy that users we likely to upgrade the drive some months down the road, if another orphaned--but better--drive becomes available.