Laptop CDRW

[Zenmervolt]

Anyone know what the power consumption of an internal laptop CDRW in write mode is compared to a DVD-ROM drive reading a disc? I got in a debate with someone who claimed that burning CDs on battery power would leave a battery life of "15-20 minutes". I said that there is no noticable difference on my ThinkPad between battery use while reading from a CD at 32x and burning a CD at 4x. He came back with the following about a PCMCIA CDRW from Toshiba:

<<Utilizing a unique Power Management System, the PORT-Noteworthy Slim line
CD-RW/CD-ROM Drive is completely mobile (in read-only mode), drawing what
little power it needs from your 16-Bit PC Card slot. With this power
management system, the NWCDRW1 only draws power when it's needed, CD-ROM
write mode requires the use of the supplied AC Adapter. During idle times,
the NWCDRW1 requires almost no power and thus, will not cause a severe drain
on your notebook's own battery.
______________________________________________________________________

That's odd... they claim a &quot;severe drain on your notebooks own battery&quot;. I
wonder how that got in there?>>

I really don't think that a CDRW draws that much more power than a CD-ROM or DVD-ROM drive draws while accessing data, am I way off base here or am I actually close to the truth? Thanks.

Zenmervolt

 

[TravisBickle]

huh, they run portable cd players off 2AA batteries. I don't think the laser used to burn is something all that high powered.

 

[Zenmervolt]

That was my reasoning. Only thing I can think of that would take more power would be the buffer, but I also figured that was about the same as the &quot;skip protection&quot; buffers on portables.

Zenmervolt

 

[corkyg]

Just a personal preference, but I would never even consider a built-in CDRW for my laptop. Burning CDs when travelling is almost a non-requirement. I do use my laptop as my principal burn station . . . but I use a Firewire external burner (QueFire! 12x10x32) and it is outstanding. Here are reasons for preferring DVD to CDRW internally:

1. Movies are more valuable to me than blank CDs when travelling.

2. THe DVD combined with an external CDRW enables CD copying and ripping.

3. I have all the download and temp storage space I need with the floppy drive being also a LS-120 drive.

But the main thing is number 1 . . . burning CDs on a 3-4 hour flight is not all that entertaining IMHO. 🙂