DVD burner on USB

[john]

I want to buy a DVD burner. Is it a good idea to buy a USB 2.0 burner
drive ?
As I have a desktop and notebook around, I want to share the drive among
PCs. Is there any known problem on external DVD burner ? Will burning
speed be lower ?

 

[Dave C.]

I want to buy a DVD burner. Is it a good idea to buy a USB 2.0 burner drive
?
As I have a desktop and notebook around, I want to share the drive among
PCs. Is there any known problem on external DVD burner ? Will burning
speed be lower ?

DVD burners are over 9GB in capacity now. Do you REALLY want to transfer
9GB over a USB connection, even if it's USB 2? I think you'd be lucky (damn
lucky) to get 1X speed out of that. So you are looking at 4 hours or so per
burn. Yikes.

Wouldn't it be better to network the computers together? Decent routers can
be found for as little as FREE after rebate now. Yes, that means you will
have to hook up a cable to transfer files from the laptop to the desktop so
you can burn them to CDR or whatever. But with an external burner, you'd be
stringing cable anyway, and it would be a lot slower. -Dave

 

[Andy]

DVD burners are over 9GB in capacity now. Do you REALLY want to transfer
9GB over a USB connection, even if it's USB 2? I think you'd be lucky (damn
lucky) to get 1X speed out of that. So you are looking at 4 hours or so per
burn. Yikes.

Wouldn't it be better to network the computers together? Decent routers can
be found for as little as FREE after rebate now. Yes, that means you will
have to hook up a cable to transfer files from the laptop to the desktop so
you can burn them to CDR or whatever. But with an external burner, you'd be
stringing cable anyway, and it would be a lot slower. -Dave

Correct me if I am wrong here but USB2 is AFAIK 480Mbits and my LAN here is
100Mbits for USB2 is faster.

http://www.everythingusb.com/usb2/faq.htm

My calculations show USB2 doing 80MB per sec so this even allowing for
overheads should be fine for DVD recording at x16 which works at a data
rate of 21.13. I am not aware of any media or burners that do anything like
this speed of burning yet

http://www.osta.org/technology/dvdqa/dvdqa4.htm

In short to the OP yes USB2 or Firewire is fine for a DVD Burner. THe only
problem is the greater expense of an external burner.

Hope this helps

Andy

 

[Mani]

I want to buy a DVD burner. Is it a good idea to buy a USB 2.0 burner
drive ?
As I have a desktop and notebook around, I want to share the drive among
PCs. Is there any known problem on external DVD burner ? Will burning
speed be lower ?

I have an external Cendyne (from Costco) USB 2.0 4X DVD burner and it
works just fine. The limiting factor is the DVD writing speed, not
the USB2 data pipe.