Can a DVD burner be put in an external case and used with a laptop w/usb 2.0?

[Lauzy]

I am thinking about building a new system with a dvd burner in it. But I have a pretty good laptop right now that I use for school and I was thinking if I could save some money and just buy an external case and put a dvd burner in it to use with my laptop. Does anyone have experience or knowledge of this that could give me some advice? I mainly want to know:

will it work?
is performance hinderedif it is hooked up to USB 2.0? - don't care that much about this as long as it is not extremely slow.
And any additional advice?

Thank you very much for your help. Have a good labor day.


lauzy

 

[Bar81]

It'll work fine, you just need to purchase an enclosure that supports USB 2.0 for the burner. Check out Newegg for various models and reviews. If you can though firewire would be a superior choice. And as long as you burn at 8x DVD and below USB 2.0 should be okay.

 

[Cerb]

It MAY work fine. Depends on the USB host controller on the PC. As far as peformance, it will be fine. I can get 8x over usb 1.1, and almost as fast as internally on USB 2.0 (read/write ~40x CD, don't have 8x DVD media to test with). That assumes it works just fine. The best advice I can give for USB is to avoid ALi chipset enclosures. You may be better off buying one external, too, rather than the enclosure.

 

[IeraseU]

It can work depending on the enclosure, however when you add the price of the drive plus the enclosure it is typically more then just buying an external drive in the first place.

So typically in this situation I just recomend buying a drive that already comes in an external enclosure.