Re: External DVDRW Drive Comments?

In article <1hxaxlu.19pr1qv1rzzoowN%syochelson.nospam@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>,
 syochelson.nospam@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
 (S & B) wrote:

> Fry's is advertising a "COMSTAR 16x External Dvdrw drive (drive by
> Pioneer) for $39.99 after $30.00 rebate
> 
> I might buy one to attach to my G5 iMac.
> 
> Comments?
> 
> Thanks in advance.
> 
> Saul

Whether its a USB or Firewire drive the enclosure is going to need bridge
chips 
to enable the drive itself to communicate over the USB or FW connection.
These 
bridge chips are never fast enough to reach the max speed of either type
of  
connection and the faster bridge chips are more expensive. If the external
drive 
enclosure is using cheap bridge chips than your maximum possible transfer
rate 
will be pretty low. With an external hard drive this is a killer, but I
don't 
know how im****tant it would be with optical drives.

I would recommend going to macsales.com and getting a drive with a lot of 
connection options, such as USB, FW and eSATA. Eventually eSATA will take
over 
and so its good to be ready for that. I bought an external CDR from
macsales and 
after two years I bought a DVDR and put it in the enclosure. Get a good 
enclosure with good bridge chips and multiple connection options and you
can use 
the enclosure for years and years.

One of the comments claimed that FW is better than USB, the only real
advantage 
of FW is the ability to handle large numbers of devices at the same time.
I 
doubt you need this. If someone had a bad experience with USB they might
have 
been using an enclosure with cheap bridge chips.