External Optical Drives?

I just purchased my first notebook. It sports an optical drive that does not meet my usual needs as far as speed. I am wondering if it would be of benefit to get a pioneer 112 and stick it in a firewire enclosure. Would it be as fast and reliable as the one i have in my desktop? The new laptop will blow the old P4 desktop away with it's core2duo T7600. So, I am hoping to get nice speed out of burning as well, when I am at home with it.

Better use it in a firewire enclosure rather than USB for optimum results. For some drives 16x burning speed can only be reached via firewire not USB.

I wonder if the Pioneer 212D drive would be good in an esata enclosure.

Nope, sata and esat is produced for harddisks...

http://www.usb-ware.com/sata-5-25-enclosure.htm
http://supermediastore.com/pioneer-d...ner-black.html

These 2 may prove otherwise

The burner has sata interface and the enclosure is for esata and specifically made for optical drives.

I dont know how e-sata would behave. Its overkill for DVD writers IMHO. Firewire should be good. Some USB chipsets are also very good.

guess i will find out. I already ordered them. lol

Hi,There shouldn't be any difference to internal Sata. Not really as it just moves the Sata connection to the outside of the computer. But there is a bridge chip, that is sometimes preventing the use of all features of the drive (speed included). So, eSata might not be that bad. And normally, it should be cheaper because of the lacking bridge electronics.

Michael

Check post #25 at http://club.cdfreaks.com/showthread.php?t=217327 to find OP there learned SATA is unstable, and I read in another forum where a user was having problems with SATA burner. Hope yours works though.

As explained before, SATA and also eSATA were introduced for working with harddisks.
Yo can try with optical drives but there is no guarantee they will work.

You are right about FW400/800. I think that all external DVD drives & their corresponding USB bridges are not the main cause of the problem. In my opinion, many notebooks and their integrated chipsets/USB controllers cannot achieve transfer rates above 18 Mbps and that is just enough for 12x speed, so the limit is mainly on their side, not the drive's enclosure itself.

Well, I finally got all the parts. I updated the firmware from pioneer official site to 1.21. I tried 3 times burning a DVD Video disc with neroUltra7 on Taiyo Yuden TYG03 premium line discs from rima.com. It says it will burn at 18x but it goes about 3 mionuites before it gets to 3% done then the remaining time jumps to over an hour. My bluetooth mouse starts acting all funny and I figure screw this it is not going to work at all. This same disc burns fine in the stock burner that came in my laptop but only at 8x max, since it is a damn 2.5 inch burner of course.

well it seemed it was the host controller. I switched to my express card slot raid5 controller and it did an amazing thing....It worked liek it was supposed to. Go Pioneer.

Now we just need some Dangerous brothers or Buffalo firmware and switch it to a 212 or 212L and all will be golden.

If it were so easy...

quote _chef_,
I don't have the link on hand, but I just read a Silicon Image paper(2004) on eSATA which indicated the development of eSATA was to work with both hard drives and optical drives(but that development of hardware for optical drives might be a year behind that for hard drives.)
One major benefit of eSATA cited by SI was eliminating the need for a chip to "translate" the data twice(in the USB or FireWire protocal). This chip to be replaced by a cheaper buffer chip.
Pardon, my terminology but I am writing from my poor memory("translate" is probably the incorrect word.)

I

I think mciahel has similar information. It should work, and its simply a matter of time to work the bugs out.
Let us know how that eSATA case goes, buggerritt.

I got everything and have been burning with it for a week now. It burns excellent. I only have had one issue with it. Ridata Dual layer discs do not seem to burn properly in it. I have had 3 in a row fail on me. I burned them fine in my 112D that has been crossflashed to 112L with 8.09 buffalo firmware. It does burn verbatim with no issues and excellent quality. No use in me posting scans since I only have those 2 drives and from what I have been reading, Pioneer drives do not perform scans well. For DVD5 I have been only using Taiyo Yuden TYG03 premium from rima.com and they work beautifully. I have been burning at top speed (18x) and playback has been flawless on every disc. Even though top speed is 18x on my 112, I still keep burning down to 16x since I have all eide internal and usb 2.0 drives on that pc. The freedom to burn at top speed is very nice. Here is a link to that enclosure. It is the only 5.25 esata single enclosure that I have been able to find on the net. It is a shame it only comes in beige.
http://www.usb-ware.com/sata-5-25-enclosure.htm
It is also a shame to waste space by adding a fan on the enclosure. It would do well to just make an aluminum case and it could then lose about 2 inches of size on the box in total. I am not a lover of fans on enclosures even for hard drives. I find they more often thatn not tend to go bad and start making noise. I have a seagate 750gb sata in an aluminum enclosure and it runs very cool to the touch. A fan is pointless. If anyone finds aan aluminum single esata 5.25 enclosure with no fan, please post the link. TIA

buggerritt
I read page you provided the link for.
Can you give any other information about the box you have?
Does it say where the factory that produced it is located?
And if by chance you opened it to look at the board, is there any chipset information you can provide?
BTW, I have been reading through some other threads and it appears some people just disconnect the fan to reduce noise and vibration, (if your careful.)

Sunnytek Information Company is the only thing listed insinde the box. Not sure about any chipset info. The fan is quiet now so no need to disable it. It is just a waste of space in my opinion. Here is Sunnytek's URL
http://www.snt.com.tw/product.php?mode=show&pid=94
I see other enclosures on their site but not the one that I purchased. The models, that are on the site, are vague in their descriptions. They do not specify if they are sata or eide.

Thanks buggerritt,
I am looking at some companies that might have something to offer as well.
If I come up with anything, I will post.