recommendations for external optical drive?

I use my notebook as a desktop replacement. I want to get an external optical drive so I can do fast ripping (mainly cd, if that matters).

What would you recommend? Are there any pitfalls with putting an internal desktop optical drive into an enclosure?

My notebook has an eSATA port, so don't I want an eSATA enclosure for fastest transfer rates? Instead of firewire (1394) or USB 2.0?

I read on cdfreaks that I should get a drive with a hack available for the firmware so that it won't be artifically slowed down when reading commercial disks (they suggested pioneer). Is this true? Or still true? The post was kind of old.

Here is an external optical drive by Pioneer:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16827129025

but it's USB 2.0. Can I achieve better results if I buy an internal drive and an eSATA enclosure? If it's only a slight improvement, then it may not be worth it to me.

I'm running Vista 64 and hoping to go dual-boot with linux soonish.

Thanks for all the help!!!

 

If you can find a genuine Plextor drive (not one that has been re-branded) they are the cream of the crop. I have used a Pioneer and have been satisfied with the results. I have also found that that the older slower write drives have had less write errors than the 20times write drives. The custemer service dept. at Lite-on said that the laser lens in the 18 times write drives had a lower failure rate than the 20 times write drive. Good Luck , and you might have to experiment in finding which brand of media works best in the drive that you select.

 

I dont know about eSata for an external burner, but some drives come with both a Firewire and Usb interface. If you can find a good Plextor drive I would not worry about the interface.

 

You do not need the bandwidth beyond USB 2.0 or firwire. So Why would you want eSATA? Brands? I myself do not care.

 

I have a NEC desktop DVD burner on a USB "5.25 enclosure and it's faster than all the integrated/laptop DVD burners I have tested.

With the integrated burners in take about 40-45 minutes to burn a DVD. With the NEC and the enclosure 8-9 minutes.

The enclosure is like this:
http://www.techsunny.com/Techsunny_Euro_EC52XPCS_USB_2.0/partinfo-id-3201825.html

For the DVD burner as I said I personly like NEC but you can use any brand you like.

 

Thanx for the advice!

Are you *sure* connection type is unimportant? I'm interested in RIPPING cds, much moreso than burning dvds. esata has 3x the data transfer rate of USB 2.0.

CD/DVD read speeds are always given as "x"-- which is a little awkward to convert to MB/s-- but I'm going to take a stab at it. Let's say a commercial cd is 600 MB and plays in 60 min. So playing that audio cd in real time is a data transfer rate of 10MB/min or 600 MB/s. A 48x rated cd drive is thus capable of ... 48x600 MB/s or 28800 MB/s or about 30 GB/s?? Do we believe that? Is that what 48x means?

No bus gives that kind of data transfer rate. So the limiting factor in reading fast is the bus speed. So eSATA (around 60 MB/s) is faster than firewire which is a bit faster than USB 2.0 (~ 20 MB/s).

Unless the cdfreak guys are right, and there's some kind of governor to slow down the read speeds of commercial cds. Then that could well be the limiting factor.

My guess is the rate of burning is much slower than USB 2.0 or 20 MB/s . (A 4 GB dvd in 10 min = 4000 MB / 600 s = 7 MB/s so yeah). That would would make connection type unimportant if your priority is burning. But I think it's different for reading.

So... back to the question. For ripping, does connection type matter?

In practical terms, I want to rip the stupid cd in under 10 mins. Three, say, would be really nice. On my notebook, the drive speed is the problem. I'd be happy if the drive could transmit data as fast (or faster) than the cpu could encode it. Obviously encoding is going to become the bottleneck at some point, but I want to BE at that point. Then I could use the same external drive setup for another cpu iteration or two (or ten?).

Sorry I'm so longwinded. But my question is more about ripping cds than burning dvds.

Feeling like a total, obsessive geek now.

 

According to this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CD-ROM#Transfer_rates

A 52x CD reader has a transfer rate of about 61 megabits/second (Mbps), or less than 8 megatbytes/second (MB/s)... much less than what USB 2.0 can handle. So for CDs at least, this is not a concern.

For a 20x DVD reader, according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD-ROM , the read speed is about 211 Mbps or 27 MB/s... which approaches but does not exceed USB 2.0 speed limitations.

 

Thank you swarmer! Yea it does not matter!

 

Thanx!!! And so much more succint than me. *sigh*

 

Yet. ....

 

Well I guess USB 2 can sometimes be below 27 MB/s under real-world conditions, so it could matter slightly for the DVD reading with a 20x drive... but certainly not for CDs.

Also, it WILL make a big difference for hard drives... so I say better to put the optical drive on the USB bus (or firewire is fine) and leave the eSATA port available in case you get an external hard drive.

 

Do you know Shin Chan?

"Uh-huh. Uh-huh."

(This is what Shin says when he seconds what someone else said... us. someone who is smarter than he is, which is not too hard. )

 

Shin Chan is a funny character.

 

I knew it didnt matter, but now I know why.

 

I concur on Plextor products. Their optical drives are the tops!

 

Some out of circulation Plextor drives actualy go up in value.