usb hd/cd enclosure vs. usb cd-rw

[rickforrest]

Just bought a laptop. I'm giving up my desktop because I need to have only one computer that I can take everywhere. So I need a cd-rw solution for my laptop.

I'm looking at 4406EU 4X4X6 CDRW EXTERNAL USB DRIVE at Onvia $189.95.

My other option is to buy an external enclosure, about $80 shipped that accepts cd-rw and hard drives. That would allow me to keep my internal cd-rw that I have in my desktop. It's an 8x4x32x, which is faster, but I wonder if I would be speed-limited by USB, such that there wouldn't be any difference in speed between the 2 drives. One advantage of the enclosure is I could also put a hard drive in there if I needed to.

Anybody have any experience in this area, any suggestions?

thanks.

rick

 

[loogie]

I was looking at the same options as you. However, I ended up getting a panasonic kxlrw10a. It was an external scsi burner with a pcmcia scsi card. You could always just get a pcmcia scsi card separately and get an external scsi burner. I'm not comfortable with usb...only 1.5meg bandwidth, correct me if i'm wrong.

 

[rickforrest]

That's certainly an option. 2 things come to mind.

1. I'm not sure that PCMCIA has a whole lot of bandwidth either.
2. My PCMCIA slots are full - modem in one, dvd accelerator in the other.

1.5 Meg ought to be enough though, especially with a buffer on the CD-RW.

rick

 

[chemwiz]

Q1: How fast is USB?
A1: Full speed USB devices signal at 12Mb/s, while low speed devices use a 1.5Mb/s subchannel.

Cut form the FAQ at http://www.usb.org/
Some good stuff on there, check it out if you get a chance.

 

[xtreme2k]

USB takes a HELL out of your cpu when it is in use
dont expect to 'multitask at ALL" when burning through USB CDRW