[Don Jenner on the Procom SCSI CD-ROM drive]

     The Procom macCD is a premium product intended

initially for Macintosh and PC-family users; it is one of a

family of high-end top-speed CD-ROM drives offered by the

company.

     PC-family users plug in using a PC-family SCSI card,

with a different set of drivers.  Procom makes such cards,

and can supply suitable drivers for use with them; if you

have someone else's SCSI board, you need suitable drivers

from that vendor.  We tested with both Procom and Always

SCSI adapters; the Procom board worked extremely well (it is

a fast buss-master board); we had good luck with the

Always SCSI using the Always ASPI driver and Corel-SCSI's 

CD-ROM driver, but less with the native Always CD-ROM driver

(Procom appears to be using a Toshiba drive, but not one 

of the models explicitly supported by Always).

     The Procom drive tested was an external unit; plug in

power, set the SCSI ID if necessary, connect a SCSI cable

and terminator and install the requisite software.  If you

don't already have SCSI, your problems will come from that part of

the puzzle, more than the drive.

     Operating the drive is similarly simple.  This drive

uses a caddy -- effectively, the equivlent of the plastic

case for a floppy drive.  Put the CD in the caddy, open the

drive door and slide the caddy in until the mechanism takes

over and seats it in the drive.  The caddy is ejected with a

touch of a button.  I am not terribly fond of caddies (only

one comes with the unit, so CD handling is still an issue,

unless one buys a lot of extra caddies).

     Installed with the Procom SCSI board and drivers, and 

the Always SCSI ASPI driver and Corel-SCSI CD-ROM driver, this

system delivered full-motion video -- the most speed-

sensitive task I can conceive -- as effectively as did both

the fixed disk and the removable disks discussed above.  The

drive came with both stereo head phones and a set of low-end

Labtech CD speakers; stereo sound at the computer bench was

a nice feature.  Using Windows' Media Player utility to

control things, I could turn that on from the computer

console, and run it in the background while working -- not a

bad way to write about multimedia....

     I had less success using Always' native CD-ROM device driver.

The drive was correctly recognized and I could play video

and digital sound files directly, but not through the

Windows Media Player utility.