external cd drive for the x41

I'm probably going to purchase the x41 tablet and was looking around for an external cd rom drive. I saw this one on the ibm website:

it's going for $200 american and is small.

Highlights
- ThinkPlus USB 2.0 CD-RW/DVD-ROM Drive
- CD-RW / DVD-ROM combo drive
- external
- 20x8x8x/6x
- Hi-Speed USB

i'm concerned about the 20x cd read speed and the 6 x dvd read speed. Is this drive too slow or will it do most applications n stuff fine? Are there better external portable drives out there for comparable price?

 

I think money wise you are better off with this:

http://www.centrix-intl.com/details.asp?productid=433

Put togther with this:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16827152048

I have the exact same setup for my T42 with the slightly older NEC ND6500. It works very well although you may have trouble achieving 8x burns with a 4200ROM drive. I think 20x and 6x is fine. If you want some burning software, CDBurnerXP is free and works well for the basic stuff.

 

The only caveat is that is you want to do a system restore, you generally need the optical drive from the manufacturer.

 

I could have sworn I did a restore on my old T41 with an external drive.

 

You may have, but I know it's a severe problem with some brands. HP and Toshiba are both brands that have been problematic.