External enclosure for DVD-RW

My DVD writer is currently installed in my linux server, but there are times when I’d like to be able to create DVDs directly from my new Windows XP box. I’m looking for an external enclosure that will let me do this. The drive is IDE (as opposed to SCSI). Both computers have on-board USB 1.1 ports, which (I believe) are too slow for DVD writing, so I don’t care about Firewire vs. USB, because I’ll have to buy a pair of PCI cards (USB 2.0 or Firewire) also.

Do any of my readers have recommendations?

posted at 3:14 pm on Monday, May 17, 2004 in Personal | Comments (3)

3 Comments

  1. Jeff K says:
    2004-05-17 at 18:07

    “New XP Box”, gee I went the other way and got *rid* of my XP box. In any event, experiment with CD-RW’s across the network several times before you commit to a DVD-R burn across the network. I’ve tried that a couple of times. It mostly works, which means I lost too many CD-R’s to justify doing it on an ongoing basis. DVD-R’s cost too much to do anything but run them in the system most likely to create them, which unfortunately, also has to be the fastest since it’s the one one would edit home-videos on, but that’s another story.

    I have a spare IEEE-1394 card, but I’m not too sure what you wanted the Firewire for, I kinda missed the gist of your message.

  2. Harald says:
    2004-05-17 at 20:49

    The idea is to place the DVD writer into an external enclosure, either USB or firewire, so that I can connect it to whichever computer is best for the job I need to do.

    The DVD writer lives in the linux server, because it is mainly used for backups. But I sometimes need to do DVD stuff on the desktop, so I want to be able to move the drive around (without shutting down and disassembling computers).

    Eventually I’ll probably get another DVD writer, but the standards need to stabalize and the prices come down before I do that. :)

  3. Jeff K says:
    2004-05-18 at 13:22

    Oh I get it, you’re building a gadget not xferring files. I would have just installed 1Gb Ethernet and shovelled the files over to the system with the DVD burner. In fact, 100Mb Ethernet is not so bad for that. I only generate a couple hundred Meg of new data on a good week and Fedora Testing is so rough I use CD-RWs for it anyway. Actually, since I do it peace-meal and delete half the photos I download from the camera and such, I barely notice the file transfers.

RSS feed for comments on this post.

Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.