increased airflow in case kills optical drives. Enclosures sought.

F

Furcifer

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Jul 4, 2005
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Okay, my p160 has a panaflo at the end of it sucking air in. Since I would rather not stick another fan in the front for noise issues, the dust builds up and basically cakes the front of my case. I think its the dust that is causing read/write failure with my optical drives after a few months. So the solution I am looking for is an external enclosure for a brand new dvd burner.

Are there issues I should be aware of? I aim to use the USB 2.0 connection as my mobo does not have firewire.
Will it be able to burn at maximum speed? Im not sure if usb 2 would have enough bandwidth to support high speed burning.
any brands/models in particular I should be looking at?


I also don't know why i bother too, i rarely use the dvd drive at all. But just on the rare occaision that I do happen to need one, I think an external one would be the best option. That and I could also use it on my laptop, which I use more often anyways.

Any info would be appreciated, thanks.
 
Yeah, i heard that too. I could consider purchasing an enclosure that supported USB and firewire, but the usb function will have to be sufficient as my mobo doesnt support firewire - and i would rather wait to upgrade mobo's to get firewire functionality rather than also have to buy a pci card.
 
I can say this from personal experience. Don't buy the BYTECC ME-320U2F. I experienced nothing but problems with it. Every time I would burn a disk, the first one would get FUBARD. I tried changing drivers all over the place, nothing helped. When I had to remove the dvd-burner, I totally demolished the case. Had such a hard time removing it. The design is not well thought out. The plastic along the sides clicks into place and covers the screws, but never quite closes on the front to look flush.
 
Hrm, thanks for the info, i was actually about to buy that model because it seems to be pretty popular.
 
doesn't matter as much for optical drives. i use a usb work shared w/several devices all at use all at the same time and it still burns me 48x CDs and 16x DVDs no problem.

w/external HD, that's where fw comes in.
 
Actually I have to stick up for my Bytecc 320, I have one at work and one at home. The one at work I use for hooking anything IDE up to my system for testing and ghosting customers drives, use it on up to 2 or 3 drives a day for 2 years with nothing but a cable replacement. The one at home I use with a liteon 16x DVD-RW and have put over 200 DVD's through it with less than 5 coasters I would say. Works great, has a cooling fan, no wall pack for power just a regular cord and I thought it disassembles easily... just my 2 cents worth.

edit: you may want to turn the fan around though, it does pull some air through the drive, but I havent noticed a problem yet.....
 
Excellent advice, thanks. I had been surfing the web and many mention problems with burning at high speeds because the USB cannot sustain high bandwidth. Then again they were a pretty hardcore bunch. I just need something external that will read/write once in a blue moon when i need it, and i guess anything will do.

Thanks again.
 
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