Guys questions about which drives to keep in system

[ellandry]

ok mu system has a HP 9300i and a Toshiba 10x dvd-rom drive. I ordered my OptoRite DD0203 and it should be her today. Should I put the Toshiba 10x dvd-rom and the Optorite together in the system or team up the HP 9300i and the Optorite? Thx

[ebenton]

I like to keep my old DVD-ROM around just for reading DVDs into my hard drive, to save a few hours of run time on my laser and motor in my DVD burner. So I would go buy myself a USB or firewire enclosure (preferably firewire, if your computer supports it) and put one or the other of your two existing drives in the enclosure. You can get some pretty nice enclosures, with fans and everything for $40-$50 on the web.
For instance, look here:
http://search.store.yahoo.com/cgi-bin/nsearch?catalog=dealsonic&query=firewire&.autodo...mageField2.y=9

[overloaded_ide]

You could get a Promise IDE card for about $35 and keep em all in there and have extra conecters for more drives latter too.

That's what I will be doing, went to order one a couple days ago, but newegg was out of stock at the time.

My system will be running a 52x Cd burner, DVD burner, and a DVD drive plus the 2 Hard drives in it now. I don't care to use the DVD burner as a 16x cd burner so I'm keeping the 52x. And I also don't want to wear out the DVD burner ripping DVDs or disk to disk copies of Cds, so I will have all 3 drives.

I do some original materials so making tons of copies is not pirating
I may later add more Burners too and another hard drive. What's the sence in having a 10 bay case and only 4 drives

Someday I plan to fill all the bays in at least one of my systems, if for no other reason than they are there!

[ellandry]

well I have a promise card already and my two 7200rpm HDs are on it

So I shouldnt use the dvd-rom to rip and install things and use the dvd-r for dvd burning and cd burning? Thus removing the HP 9300i from the system?

[ebenton]

My main point in my first post was that you don't need to get rid of anything, given the relatively low cost of a firewire/USB enclosure. If you have to get rid of anything, I would get rid of the 9300i and keep the DVD-ROM for reading DVDs.

[overloaded_ide]

How many drives you got in there and how many can you have?

Not being familar with your system I figured your like most people and are using the onboard IDE that is on nearly all newer system boards and it was full like mine. Thus I suggested the Promise Card.
I geuss it also depend which one you have, as I think they make one that support 2 drives and the one I'll be getting that supports 4 drives. I think they also have others like for raid and such I won't be using so I never looked at those that much.

With all my systems I have support for 4 drives onboard and the promise card will raise it to 8 drives I can have

You could probably add a second Promise card, though I would check it out first.

So I shouldnt use the dvd-rom to rip and install things and use the dvd-r for dvd burning and cd burning? Thus removing the HP 9300i from the system?

That's what I would do I guess if I needed to drop one drive off the list. Use a DVD drive for everything that does not involve burning and just use the Burner for Burning.

[theDruid]

It depends really on what you typically use your PC for...

If you burn lots of CD's (and will continue to burn CD's rather than just DVD's once you've got your DVD burner) then it's a good idea to keep your CD-RW installed in the machine.

As people have said, you want to avoid wearing out the expensive DVD burner's moving parts etc.. doing jobs that the (much cheaper to replace) CD-RW can do.

If, on the other hand, you rip a lot of DVD's and won't be burning many CD's once you can do DVD's, then you'd want to keep the DVD-ROM in there for the same reason.

I personally would look into a way of keeping all three drives - but really it depends on what you think you'll be using your machine for once the DVD burner arrives.... I'd look into installing another IDE controller - but then I burn a lot of CD's!!

cheers,
mcdruid.