I have a PC and an IDE system and have gone thru 1 excrutiatingly frustrating experience with the HP 7200i (internal guts made by Phillips - avoid like you'd avoid a plague. Major bugs in the firmware of the unit.)

The one that has proven consistent and very reliable for me is the HP 8200i. (The internal guts of this puppy are manfactured by Sony....so you can't go wrong there, and that was the reason I bought it.) After my previous experience, the "HP" name on it meant nothing.) It uses either write-once CDs (a.k.a CD-R) and also CD rewritables (a.k.a. CD-RW).

It sells for about 225.00 U.S...or around 325.00 CDN.

I love it and consider it an indispensable part of my PC setup. When you consider that a 100 meg zip disk which costs between 15 and 20 bucks, can hold 100 megs of data, and that a blank CD can hold nearly 650 megs of data or 74 minutes of music, at a cost of about 2 bucks per blank, there is no argument as to which is the better backing up and archiving medium.

The things that I find especially useful, are taking a bunch of music CDs from my exisiting collection, and making 1 custom compilation CD of all my favourites tunes for listening to in the car.

My kids have a Sony Playstation, and they are really hard on CDs as they are always mishandling them. When you figure the average cost of a store bought Playstation CD is between 40 and 75.00 bucks (CDN), to me it makes perfect sense to create a copy (no guilt here because I did by the original)and let them use the copy to play with, and store the originals in a safe place. (Mind you you need a special "MOD" chip to play the copies, but it's worth it.

I also like the fact that I can back up my entire life (all my critical business files, financial data, and other essential documents on 1 single CD, with room to spare, and well as saving scanned family pictures, on to them. Anything you can do with a floppy disk or hardrive as far as saving/backing up, you can do with a re-writable CD. Mind you, CD-RW (rewritable disks) are expensive (around 35.00 CDN) and have a limit of about 1000 re-writes before they go south. For me it's cheaper to just backup bi-monthly to a cheap 2 dollar CD-R.

There is also a new tax coming into effect that will be added to the cost of blank CDs (2 bucks added to the cost of 1 disk)....which is supposed to be distributed to royalty funds (BMI -ASCAP - SOCAN, etc.) so you can copy any music CD you want, without feeling guilty. To me, it's the same difference as taping a show or a movie from TV and watching it over again (with the network have already paid the royalties or performance rights for you.

Nice thing is too, if you go to your local library, you can sign out any music CDs you like and copy them. The libraries must know they are encouraging this sort of thing.

Mind you, I'd willingly pay for a Rick Fielding CD. He needs the money. Sting, Michael Jackson, The Stones, etc.etc.etc.etc.......don't.