Advantages/Disadvantages of internal/external DVD

[saspgmr]

Other than the obvious advantage of portability and the disadvantage of finding a place to put an external DVD burner, what are the advantages/disadvantages of external vs. internal drives (assuming USB 2.0/firewire connections for the external drive)?

[Greg12]

The only real disadvantage of external DVD burners are the extra cables.


Firewire has enough constant bandwith and so does USB 2.0 that external burners do not suffer any slow down.


I use a Sony DRU500A in an ADS Pyro Firewire box and it works fine.


I strongly advise you buy an internal unit and place it in a firewire house as it seems for some strange reason that external units are crippled.

Like alot of external CD-RW's are not that fast, yet my DRU500A burns at 24x via firewire no problems


Their's no real disadvantage to external

[VinnySem]

Depending of where your computer is, one of the not-so-apparent disadvantages of an external drive is THEFT.

[ipgpe13]

Reason I went for an external DVD burner (Sony DRX 500 ULX) was that I had no open bays in my computer and I did not want to remove any of my existing drives. Too many possible problems and effort installing a new drive.

My Sony was just plug-and-play in Windows XP with no problems through USB 2.0.

I looked at getting an internal Sony and buying a usb2.0 or firewire box, but the cost of the internal and a box came out to almost the same as the external Sony so I went with that so save on time and work.

[painkiller]

Other issues/side effects:
If you use an external DVD burner:
1) You can "fill up" the PC with hard drives, a maximum of 4 if you want.
2) Yo can use it on a laptop, if it has USB and/or Firewire ports.

Reason to use it as an external device:
For an Intel Motherboard, at least according to my 845G model, the 7400 EIDE hard drives will slow down if you put standard IDE 5400rpm device on the same ide cable.

So I went with the Sony DRU-500UL.

See if that helps you.