Inexpensive DVD drives that work w/retrospect?

[bbowler]

Here's an "ideal world" situation...

 

I have an older machine that's running WinXP Pro SP2. It currently has Retrospect 6.0.206 (yes, I know it's old) and an HP CDWriter+ 8200 drive. I have ~200 CD's worth of backup data.

 

I'd like to upgrade the system to a DVD writer with the following requirements.

 

- The new drive *MUST* be capable of reading my existing retrospect backup CDs

- The new drive must be supported by Retrospect (preferably version 6.0.206, I'll upgrade if I have to but would prefer not)

- The new drive would, ideally, cost less than $100 and would have an IDE/EIDE/ATAPI interface. (it can cost a bit more if I don't have to upgrade Retrospect)

 

Does such a drive exist?

 

Thanks!

Bruce

[jhg]

Unfortunately, the list of currently-available DVD drives that are guaranteed to work with such an old version of Retrospect is almost empty. The reason is that drives that were certified for that version haven't been in production for quite a while. It's highly unlikely you'll find an unused one, and you take your chances on a used one.

 

Even for 7.5 it's getting hard to find an available, certified drive. The operative word here is "available". Check this link http://kb.dantz.com/display/2n/articleDirect/index.asp?aid=7946&r=0.7291986

for the latest drives supported under 7.5. When you try to find one for sale you'll see that most are discontinued. There's no guarantees that a more recent follow-on model to one that was previously certified will actually be usable with Retrospect.

[bbowler]

That link points to a "session timed out".

 

I assume that it (originally) pointed to the "find a drive" search feature, which I have used extensively, and have come to the same conclusion you mentioned (they aren't available).

 

So what's a person to do? EMC has been "less than responsive" in areas around device support and standards (MMC2, for example) but they have, arguably, the (otherwise) best software.

 

Bruce

[rhwalker]

Check this link http://kb.dantz.com/display/2n/articleDirect/index.asp?aid=7946&r=0.7291986

for the latest drives supported under 7.5.

Posting links from the KnowledgeBase is an art because of the funky interface. You have to use the "Bookmark" link in the right-hand pane to generate a link that will be persistent.

 

I think that the intended link was to the Retrospect (Windows) RDU version history article:

Retrospect RDU version history

 

Russ

[rhwalker]

EMC has been "less than responsive" in areas around device support and standards (MMC2, for example)

Optical drive support has been poor, and it has taken a long time for new drive revisions to become supported. Tape support has been much better. We only use tape (and have done so for over 15 years with Retrospect), and just take care to make sure that a tape drive / autoloader is supported before we purchase.

 

Part of the problem is that Retrospect uses a different set of commands to write optical media than do most other DVD/CD burning software (packet writing vs. "track at once") so that the optical media backup sets can be appended in future sessions (no session close done), and not all drives reliably support the command set that Retrospect needs. See:

Retrospect support for optical media

 

Russ