Why does this FAQ exist?

In the early days of Sun Microsystems workstations, the CD-ROM drive requirements were very strict. That is, in order for any CD-ROM drive to function on a Sun workstation, it either had to be made/marketed by Sun or support a 512 byte block size. Since third-party CD-ROM drives were often much cheaper than those sold by Sun, curious users started investigating the use of generic CD-ROM drives as opposed to those branded by Sun. It was soon discovered that, in fact, most drives on the market at the time did not work with Sun hardware and as such this FAQ was born in an effort to educate.

What's new in the FAQ?

Major overhaul in FAQ layout and some content updates. All information emailed to me has been reflected in the latest release of the FAQ.

Notice! To all people mirroring this FAQ, the filenames have changed and as such previous copies of "index.html" will not work with the newly reformatted FAQ. Please grab a recent copy!