Burning from external HDD - good or bad?

[godbeer]

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 August 27, 2006 by godbeer

[cornholio7]

keep the burn speed to 8x or under and you shouldn't experience any problems, i burn usb hdd to firewire or usb dvd r all the time, no problems at 8x

[godbeer]

Thanks,

 

I always burn at 4x just to be safe, so I didn't think it would be a problem - I just wanted to get a second opinion to make sure.

 

Roy

[volvofl10]

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

[LIGHTNING UK!]

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.