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New HD or CDRW/DVD for Dell Laptop?

A

AmigaMan

Diamond Member
I have a Dell Latitude C840 laptop that work provided me. It came with just a 24x CDROM built in and nothing in the modular bay. Since it comes with a firewire port too, I'm using it to download home videos from my mini-dv camcorder.
What would you all recommend I do as an addition to it? Should I get a CDRW/DVD modular drive for around $200 or another 40-60GB HD for about the same price? I don't like to keep personal stuff on my work drive but I also would like to watch dvd's on it while traveling. Thanks!
 
Why don't you get an external firewire hard drive (7200 rpm) which would be useful for your DV captures? If you really wanted to, you could daisy chain an external IDE dvd-rom in a firewire case for less than $100. I guess it all really depends on where you are doing most of your leisure work and DV recording.

In my case, I bought a modular bay shell for my Inspiron 8200 and put a 40 GB hard drive in there. I use it for my video captures and for my mp3s. The casing and screws came out to about $25 from Dell Accessories and the hard drive about $150 from NewEgg. I find that to be very useful but I originally wanted an external hard drive. I realized that I wanted to take my files with me so I researched a bit and found out about the modular hard drive case and that worked great.
 
AmigaMan, from your post, I think it's clear that the combo drive is the way to go, that way you are able to watch DVD's while traveling. Also, keep in mind that you may be able to find a larger HD for your Dell lappy elsewhere for a far better price than Dell charges. BTW, what size HD do you have in there right now?

BTW one more post and you're a Golden Member, congrats 🙂
 
I have a 40GB built in drive. I use about half of it for work stuff leaving a little less than 1 hours worth non-compressed AVI available. Will those external firewire HD's work well with a mini-dv camcorder? I've heard that occasionally you'll get dropped frames and what not.

Woohooo Golden after all these years of being on AT... 🙂
 
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