What can I do with a CD-ROM tower?

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Wingy

[H]ard|Gawd
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Dec 18, 2000
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I just got a free CD-ROM tower from work. It's quite old. I really have zero experience with them, but I was wondering what exaclty I can do with it? Could I replace the drives with DVD-ROMs or CD-RWs? I'm not too familiar witht he connector, is this thing prolly SCSI or something?

Basically if anybody could tell me anything about these things, I'd love to know. Google came up with nothing for me besides stores trying to sell them.

Edit: It's got 7 CD-ROM drives.
 
It's kind of tough for us to answer any of your questons, considering you didn't give us a link, or a name and model, or even a picture of the connector. Put up some info, and we can go from there.
 
He's right, but, I'll bet that basically the system is too highly custom made to be able to just stick in a standard drive. And definitely don't put in CD-RWs. I can only begin to imagine the amount of trouble involved in getting such a thing to actually burn discs.

That said, darn, free is still one heck of a nice deal. I'd just love to put some of my many games in one of those so I could stop reaching, getting cases mixed up and so on, even dropping a few times. I could never afford to waste money on something that's only "nice" to have, but not even the least bit essential.
 
It is scsi, And it's a plextor model. I'm not sure of the number atm, I don't have it with me right now.

Sooooooooo bleh any ideas on what i can do with this thing?
 
Pick out the programs/games/audio CDs that you use most often and put them in there. That way, you won't have to be constantly swapping back and forth all the time. It's really quite a nice timesaver thing. The main thing to worry about, I guess, might be transfer speed, but even with games that's not usually as big of a deal as the manufacturers want you to think. You can get by on a 12x or so I think even if you have high bitrate videos or something. It may not work well with some of the really really picky copy protections though, so not all games may work.

An example of the convenience of such a thing. Install MS Office in run of the cd mode or openoffice.org in network mode. Leave the disc in there somewhere and you should find it quite easy to start it up any time. Ok, this isn't the greatest example, it only saves a couple hundred mb or so tops, but, still, you get the idea.
 
It'd realy be nice to find a way to put burners in that thing...
 
Why? If you think to burn a bunch of things at the same time, there are severe limitations to that. Even if you could somehow get past the bandwidth issues, eventually the harddrive is too slow or the cpu just can't take it all. If you need an external burner, you are MUCH better off getting a real one too as it will run better and be more portable by far. If it's just so you have a burner at all, then there's nothing wrong with putting a plain one inside your PC.

Anyway, if it's possible at all, you'd have to match the drives pretty darned well. They'd probably need to be the same brand and everything to be sure that it's compatible with the way the device works. However, the only tower I've ever seen (which admitedly isn't necessarily the same as all others) handled the cdroms internally. When you hook the thing up and get it all set up, do you see an array of drives? Or do you just see one or something like that? If it's all handled by the tower itself, then there's basically nothing you can do since I SERIOUSLY doubt it can process burn information. Either way, it's going to have to go through one connection to hook up to your pc, no? That means that it must do some small amount of processing at the very least.
 
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