Any adverse effects with ext mounted DVD drives

[Takeshi]

I'm thinking of mounting my old (region free) internal Pioneer DVD-ROM to an external USB 2 enclosure or IDE adaptor, thus leaving two newer DVD writers as internal. I'm not sure if the present power supply (350W) will cope with three internal DVD drives - although usually only one drive will be running.

Are there any adverse performance issues connecting ext. DVD drives? Specifically I mean data transfer, interruption of play? PC or laptop are both running XP SP2.

Or will the power be OK if only one DVD drive is running?

Thanks for any advice!

[ripken204]

well if u dont have enough power, then your psu may blow up or your computer will just shut down/crash.

[Zxian]

well if u dont have enough power, then your psu may blow up or your computer will just shut down/crash.

Blow up? Most of the time your computer will just crash - it's rare for a PSU to blow up from being overloaded.

As for the original question - why do you need 3 optical drives? You listed one DVD-ROM and two DVD-RW drives - something that seems a little overboard. If you want to keep the region free drive, put that in your system and just use one of the DVD-RW drives. You even said yourself that it'll just be one of them running at any point, so why have three at all?

What are the rest of your system specs? If you're not running crazy high-end PCI-E graphics cards and dual CPU setups, then if the PSU is a decent brand, you should be fine. I had an old Athlon XP 2000+, 1 DVD-RW, 1 CD-RW, and 4 hard drives all running off a 350W Antec PSU, and I never had any problems.

Putting the drive in an external enclosure usually doesn't hurt all that much, unless you've got a lot of other traffic on the USB bus (external hard drive, USB flash keys, USB wireless, etc). I doubt that you'd notice the difference in performance of the drive from one to the other, but it adds another "something" to your desk.

[ripken204]

i said "may" blow up...

[Takeshi]

Thanks for the replies.

My system is quite old by now:

AMD xp 1600+

MSI K7T266 Pro2 RU

Enermax Power 350W

4 IDE HDs (two on IDE, two on onboard RAID)

ATI AIW 9600xt graphics card AGP

SBA card IDE

NIC IDE card

Pioneer DVD-ROM + DVR (on 2nd IDE)

Yes having three DVD drives seem overboard. Previously I had this Pioneer DVD-ROM and Pioneer DVR 106D. The DVD-ROM I though had stopped working (didn't read discs properly). So I recently bought a new Pioneer DVR 111D for its DL buring ability. But after connecting the new DVR it turned out that the old DVD-ROM is working properly and the IDE cable is faulty.

So now I have one DVD-ROM and two DVRs. I've run out of IDE slots. I could use the DVD-ROM as an ext. drive for my laptop too, as the laptop DVR is not region-free.

What's the difference between a drive enclosure and drive adaptor?

Edited July 3, 2006 by Takeshi

[Zxian]

The adaptor just takes the pins on the back of the drive and sticks a USB cable onto them (or so to speak). The enclosure fits around the drive and protects it from dust.

TBH, I'd just sell one of the DVD-burners either to a friend or on eBay or something like that. You'll save yourself some money (make some back) and a bit of hassle making everything work when it seems to already. Either that or just keep the drive for your next upgrade system.

[Takeshi]

Thanks. I'll keep them all. The new DVR was less than CAD50 anyway.

[Zxian]

Yeah, the drives are cheap. At least you've got parts for a second system when you get around to building your next one.