CDRW- 1 external or 3 internal ones for studio?

satchmosatchmo
Posted:
in General Discussion edited January 2014
Looking to finally update our pokey (get this) 2x speed CDRW external drive!

We have 3 sawtooth G4's with internal DVD drives which don't serve our needs at all.

We currently back up our files by sending them to one "server" Sawtooth connected to the external cdrw drive via 10bT cable. Rather time consuming when you have huge graphic files.



I'm wondering if it would be wiser to spend for 3 cheap internal drives or to have one more expensive external drive. Any other benefits to an external one other than the obvious mobility?

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 3
    lucaluca Posts: 3,833member
    I would think putting an internal one on each computer would be the most convenient. It's less than $40 for a 52x internal CD-RW, so you can outfit all three computers with them for a little more than $100. An external one would be nice but if you have internals on all of them, you wouldn't need the mobility. However, a single external would cost quite a bit less than three internals. A Firewire case is only about $40, so an external CD-RW should be under $100.
  • Reply 2 of 3
    satchmosatchmo Posts: 2,699member
    Yeah, I was thinking of going the internal route. Mainly for convenience in that each person could backup their files whenever they wanted and not have to share any external unit.



    But I thought an external might be more faster using firewire instead of IDE.
  • Reply 3 of 3
    lucaluca Posts: 3,833member
    True, the maximum transfer rate would be 33 MB/s on the Sawtooth's ATA/33 bus versus 50 MB/s on Firewire, but a 52x CD-RW burns CDs slower than that anyway. My PowerMac G4 has a 48x Combo drive and it seems to burn CDs at full speed anyway.
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