2002.01.27 ~00 playing with CD-RW Being new to CD-RW (or any non-ROM optical storage), I read up on and played around with 'cdrecord' and 'mkisofs'. Decided to give dummy-writing a go to see how long it would take. # dd if=/dev/zero bs=1M count=650 | cdrecord dev=0,0,0 -dummy - After it did the normal 10-sec countdown warning and started, I C-C'd it after 6 minutes since it defaulted to 4x speed and I calculated it would take over a half-hour to "write". The WRITE LED stayed busy. I pushed EJECT. WRITE LED stayed busy. I waited. WRITE LED stayed busy. Played a round of Quake 3. WRITE LED stayed busy. Played a few rounds of Tribes 2. WRITE LED stayed busy. By now, the WRITE LED stayed busy for three hours (more than enough time to write even in half-speed). As an IDE/ATAPI CD-RW, I figured all I need to do is tell the hardware to give it a kick to the interface. A reset. But I didn't want to reboot. Check hdparm(8), canonical tool for doing untowards thing with the IDE system. Lo and behold, drive reset: # hdparm -w /dev/hdc WRITE LED went non-busy. CD ejected. CD-RW responded to bus queries, et al. Happiness. Then I tested with a 10MB chunk of zeroes and speed=10 (16x10x32 drive). 12 seconds. Then 65MB. 51 seconds. Multiply. 8.5 minutes. Should test if it'd buffer underrun next. (20 minutes later) Yep. 8.5 minutes, and no buffer underrun.