Jump to content

Burning from external HDD - good or bad?


godbeer

Recommended Posts

I recently added a WD external firewire 400 gb, 16mb cache hard drive to my pc to store .iso files , dvd images ripped in file mode, etc. that were clogging my internal drives, since I don't always have the time to burn a disc directly after ripping it, and sometimes hold on to them for awhile so I can tweak them (remove extraneous material, etc.)

 

My pc is moderatly fast - P4 630 ht 3ghz, 2gb ram - and has 2 internal sata drives - Imageburn is on my boot drive (1) and I've burned images from drive 2 (configured as a storage drive) many times with no problems. I'm not sure about burning an image from the external drive though, since it's noticeably slower when tranferring files (mostly write speed, read speed is fairly fast).

 

As for burning, is it safe to burn a dvd from an image stored on an external drive, or should I copy it back to one of my internal drives before burning? The reason I'm asking is that I remember once reading that you shouldn't burn an image from an external drive, but that was a couple years ago when external drives were just usb (and probably before usb 2.0 became the norm), and external firewire drives were a rarity. I don't think speed will be a problem, my main concern is that doing it this way would be more prone to errors or produce a less reliable burn.

 

Any info or advice would be greatly appreciated.

 

Roy

Edited by godbeer
Link to comment
Share on other sites

ive beta tested with firewire ext HDD's for some time, and have no problem whatsoever at 8X . thats mainly due to my external writer only going to 8x with -R discs.

 

if your writer is a 12x model or higher then give it a try , see how it goes. i would avoid 16x though as most 16x media isnt brilliant

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Being a removable drive, windows will probably disable some, if not all the write caching. If you don't plan on just pulling the plug on the device, go into device manager, find the drive listed in the disk drives branch and edit its properties to enable write cache. That should speed things up.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

×
×
  • Create New...

Important Information

By using this site, you agree to our Terms of Use.