Optical drive recommendation

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BP

If you are going to have a CD-RW drive and a DVD-RW drive, is it better to
have 2 separate drives or a combo drive? What do most people here do?
 
If you are going to have a CD-RW drive and a DVD-RW drive, is it better to
have 2 separate drives or a combo drive? What do most people here do?
Click to expand...

That depends. If you plan on copying a lot media, playing a music CD in
the background, etc., then two separate drives are a good idea. Otherwise
one DVD burner (which can read/write both DVDs and CDs) will work.
 
BP said:
If you are going to have a CD-RW drive and a DVD-RW drive, is it better to
have 2 separate drives or a combo drive? What do most people here do?
Click to expand...

Combo drive. Why duplicate?


--
Conor

I'm so grateful to the USA for their contribution to the war on terror.
After all, if they hadn't funded the IRA for 30 years, we wouldn't know
what terror was.
 
BP said:
If you are going to have a CD-RW drive and a DVD-RW drive, is it better to
have 2 separate drives or a combo drive? What do most people here do?
Click to expand...

Sometimes it's nice to have two drives: for copying from one to the
other, for leaving your gaming cdrom in one while burning with the
other, etc. Personally, if you can afford the extra dollars, get two DVD
burners if you'll be copying directly from one to the other. I get by
with an external DVD burner and a regular cdrom, but it's been a bit
pesky with some programs not liking external enclosures (such as Nero
and, apparently, Acronis TrueImage's boot disk creation utility...still
testing this latter one). As such, I'm putting a cdrw in as well as the
cdrom. That way I can leave my WarCraft III TFT cd in there and not have
to keep replacing it when I want to use other cdroms.

Ari


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spammage trappage: remove the underscores to reply

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hospital following this resulted in a serious illness. I now need a bone
marrow transplant. Many people around the world are waiting for a marrow
transplant, too. Please volunteer to be a marrow donor:
http://www.abmdr.org.au/
http://www.marrow.org/
 
BP said:
If you are going to have a CD-RW drive and a DVD-RW drive, is it better to
have 2 separate drives or a combo drive? What do most people here do?
Click to expand...

I have a DVD-ROM and a CD-RW. The Lite-On LTD163 that came with this system
hasn't been able to read a DVD in more than a year and a half, so I really
have a CD-ROM and a CD-RW until I can replace it. It reports everything
working properly, it reads CDs just fine, and my son's drive works in this
computer. But when a DVD is in the drive, it just tells me "Windows can't
read from this disk."

I think what that means is I'd suggest TWO DVD-capable drives if you intend
to handle DVDs much. I don't, so it hasn't mattered so far. My son's
computer has a DVD-writer on the LAN if I really need it.

It might also mean I wouldn't recommend Lite-On, but they have a pretty good
reputation overall, and I've seen bad ones from other brands as well. I
would recommend paying attention to what the warranty period is and checking
out the drive near the end of it. This one might have failed in warranty,
but there's no way to go back now.

Two DVD drives gives you an advantage in troubleshooting, too. If one
fails, it's the drive; if both fail at once, it's a wider system problem or
a Windows problem. This one is a failed drive, probably loss of the laser
that reads DVDs.
 
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