CD ROM FAQ Caddy Or Drawer

Information in this page updated: 07 Jan 96


4. Caddy or drawer

Caddies and drawers come from two different points of the market: A disk is very well protected in a caddy. and the mechanics of the drive is more complicated. Theses drives are mainly for the professional market; they have more expensive disks (US-$1000 or more) with valuable contents (adresses, books etc.) and they don't change these disk not very often. Sometimes only once a year or so.

On the other hand, disks for the mass market come very cheap (US-$10 or less) and with constantly changing contents, you probably have more than one disk that contains interesing data. At home you may flip through these disks very often in a short time. So the drawer gives you faster access to the disks but is less protective.

So what to buy? If you have a expensive valuable disk the costs for the caddy (about US-$5) wont matter, neither will the higher price for the drive. But if you are a normal home user, you probably have those magazine disks and you're not willing to spend more than 30 bucks for a CD. If you have a caddy for each of them this could get expensive for you.

'Hey, I can change the disk in the caddy, so I do need only 2 or 3 caddies!' you might say. But you're going to sacrifice the higher protection (and cheaper caddies sacrifice the mechnics of your drive. It's just not built to insert, eject, insert, eject, insert, eject... in a high frequency!)

Caddy
good protection for valuable disks, every disk should have a caddy, mechanism is not build for high changing frequency, can operate in vertical position
Drawer
medium protection for the mass market, easy access to the disk, mechanism can withstand high changing frequency, can not operate in a vertical position (except for the XM4101 or equal drives!)
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