Laptop internal DVD burner

[Pyrotechnic]

I've got a Dell B130 laptop with a cd burner / dvd drive. I've been wanting to a install a DVD burner in it's place, but it from what I can collect, the hard drive and optical drive are master and slave on the same IDE channel. Why this is the case I don't know, but it seems to be common practice on many laptops. I've never had a DVD burner on this laptop, but it seems other laptops I've used with this configuration end up burning DVD's extremely slow. You can tell the program to burn at the fastest speed, but it'll only go as fast as it can get the data. In this case it wouldn't even be worth it.

Now I've taken a 3.5" IDE to USB 2.0 external enclosure i had and connected the 5.25" 18x DVD burner from my desktop as a makeshift external drive and it works well. I can burn at 4x with no issues. I have not tried faster but 4x isenough for me since I don't like coasters. It's bulky and ghetto looking but it works. I'd like to get the internal drive if I can though since it's simply less to carry around.

Those of you with internal DVD burners as a slave to the hard drive on the same channel, are burn speeds acceptable or are these just isolated incidents that I experienced ?

 

[cyberfish]

I doubt it will be slower than USB 2.0, even on the same channel.

My laptop is SATA, though, so I don't know.

 

[chinky714]

depending on the drive itself it can be problematic or good. Matsu****a which is also Mat****a/Panasonic can have finicky drives that have problems with burn speed or just problem with the media not being good for the drive. Look for an NEC, I went from a Mat****a UJ-850 to an NEC 6550 and never looked back its awesome for speed and reliability.

 

[Pyrotechnic]

Anyone else have experience with this shared channel stuff ? Right now I have a TSST (Toshiba/Samsung) 24X burner which works pretty well, despite the shared channel, but I believe a DVD at 4x is more demanding as far as data speed ?

I suppose if I can score a DVD drive for a decent price, it may be worth trying out. When I ordered this laptop, a DVD burner was an option, so it may work just fine.

 

[Know Nuttin]

No problems here, I've burned at 8x on an older Acer TM 2428.

 

[cyberfish]

DVD 1x ~= CD 9x (by data transfer rate), so 4x DVD is like 36x CD.

 

[madhatter256]

I think it is only that model that shares the IDE channel w/ the optical and hard disk. I'd probably just go with an external USB. You do have USB2.0, right? I did this with my old laptop (inspiron 6000) because it didn't have a DVDRW drive. The speed of writing was average. It never really hit 16x, but it was definitely around 8x speed.