Are USB burners as good as IDE or SCSI...??

[Cybordolphin]

Thinking about buying a USB burner.

I have a Pent III 450 at 600mhz and 128 PC133 SDRAM.

Thanks for any help.

 

[dawks]

Im sure most people will say that USB burners suck. There is nothing wrong with USB buners. I have one, and I've burned about 200 CD's without a coaster. No problems at all. If you plan on moving the burning around, to different computers, then USB is the way to go. If you plan on using it with just one system, then IDE or SCSI is the way to go.

People will also say that USB burners use alot of CPU power, which they dont. While burning a CD 4x, my PII 400 is about 85-90% idle.

 

[jmcoreymv]

Am I doing the calcs right, or is the fastest burner u could use on usb 10x, cuz 1x is 150kbytes/sec therefore 10x is 1500 kbytes and that would fully saturate the theoretical max of the usb bus.

 

[Soccerman]

well if you are having buffer underruns from IDE CD Burning, then USB will be worse.

normally you shouldn't really have much else running besides the burning program (I'm on a K6-2 400, with a slower hard drive), and perhaps your MP3 player (it doesn't take much CPU time!).

I personally, would rather have everything in my computer SCSI, just becuase it's one more step towards relieving the CPU from doing extra stuff, and therefor I get more speed out of my computer.

if you saw that comparison at toms hardware between Firewire and USB and IDE Hard drives, you'll notice that USB is horrid for Hard drives. not only do they (currently) have horrible throughput (12 megaBITS/second I think), but they eat CPU time worse then IDE. in fact, becuase Firewire eats less CPU time, it actually was faster then IDE in some circumstances!

your CD Burner will not be able to hit anything faster then 1.5 megs/second if that above number for USB is correct.

 

[dawks]

Yea, USB burners cant go higher then 10x, but I think the fastest you'd see is 6x, maybe 8x. Just because of limitations.

Like I said, USB burners are great if you need to use them on multiple systems, but if your just using it on one, go for IDE or SCSI.

 

[PCAddict]

The replies posted already pretty much cover everything. The only time I'd consider using a USB burner on a regular desktop PC would be if I didn't have an IDE channel for it, or couldn't do SCSI for some reason.

 

[Floyd]

Yet another confirmation that what everyone here has said about USB burners is true. You just have to weigh the positives and negatives against your specific needs. Portability is great, but you will indeed have to be more careful to avoid buffer underruns. It's not so much that the USB interface eats up all of your processor cycles, but since the throughput is so marginal, it only has to be interrupted for a brief moment by another process to cause an underrun. I have a Sony USB in addition to a Plextor SCSI. My home system is a Celeron II @ 850MHz and I still sometimes get an underrun with the USB, sometimes with no justifiable reason whatsoever (i.e. no background apps, no power management, and no activity at the keyboard). I've found though, that if you're running a Windows NT OS, you can assign a higher priority to the burning application (in Task Manager) and buffer underruns will become virtually nonexistant.

Best regards,
Floyd

 

[dawks]

Also, like I said, out of the 200+ CD's I have burnt on my USB burner, not a single coaster.
I am using a Zip650 CD-RW.

 

[Mday]

while there is nothing wrong with usb inherently...

i'd rather have a firewire burner than usb... or a usb 2.0 burner

IF i wanted an external burner...

scsi would be best in terms of external, next to firewire...

--

it's just not fast enough, and i have a usb keyboard, mouse, and tv tuner. so you KNOW i cannot watch tv and burn at the same time if i had usb. but with my ide burner (plextor 12x10x32a), i can watch tv and burn... =)