Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
Figure 11.18. The EasyWrite logo is used on some CD-RW and DVD+R/RW drives
manufactured in 2003 and beyond that support the Mount Rainier standard.
Mount Rainier's main features include these:
•
Integral defect management
—Standard drives rely on driver software to manage defects.
•
Direct addressing at the 2KB sector level to minimize wasted space
—Standard CD-RW
media uses a block size of 64KB.
•
Background formatting so that new media can be used in seconds after first insertion
—
Standard CD-RW formatting can take up to 45 minutes depending on drive speed.
•
Standardized command set
—Standard software cannot work with new drives until revised
command files are available.
•
Standardized physical layout
—Differences in standard UDF software can make reading
media written by another program difficult.
Mount Rainier compatibility is also known as CD-MRW or DVD+MRW compatibility. Drives with
the Mount Rainier or EasyWrite logo have this compatibility built in, but some existing CD-RW
drives can be updated to MRW status by reflashing the firmware in the drive.
You must also have OS or application support to use Mount Rainier. Windows Vista and later have
Mount Rainier support built in; Linux kernel version 2.6.2 and above also include Mount Rainier
support. For Windows XP or older editions, you must use recent versions of Nero AG Software's
InCD or Roxio's DirectCD or Drag-to-Disc or other Mount Rainier-compatible programs to support
Mount Rainier.
Ripping/Copying Discs
All optical drives can
play
Red Book-formatted CD-DA discs, but not all optical drives can
read
CD-DA discs. The difference sounds subtle, but it is actually quite dramatic. If you enjoy music and
want to use your PC to manage your music collection, the ability to read the audio data digitally is an
important function for your CD (and DVD) drives because it enables you to much more easily and
accurately store, manipulate, and eventually write back out audio tracks.
To record a song from CD to your hard disk, it was once necessary to play the disc at normal speed
and capture the audio output as analog, hence the need for the four-wire analog audio cable
connection from the rear of optical drives to your sound card. Fortunately, for several years drives
have supported
digital audio extraction
(DAE). In this process, they read the digital audio sectors
directly and, rather than decode them into analog signals, pass each 2,352-byte sector of raw (error-
corrected) digital audio data directly to the PC's processor via the drive interface cable (ATA,
SATA, SCSI, USB, or FireWire). Therefore, no digital-to-analog conversion (and back) occurs, and
