Laptop USB 1.0 to "Internal" DVD Writer Possible?

Newbie Forum
#1

All,

I have an ollld Sony Vaio Notbook PCG-838 which is roughly a ~500Mhz/~190MB machine with good 'ole USB 1.0.

I just pulled my ollllld internal HP dvd writer (dvd200i) out of my hand-built tower (and replaced it with a new Pioneer DVR-A07 (whoop!whoop!).

I doubt I can do it but thought I’d try… to connect the dvd200i to my laptop. I know, I know, I can network data over to my tower and burn from there, but it’s not always connected to my network.

I’m thinking some sort of external enclosure is required by can’t find any good information about such a gizmo.

One large doubt I have is it won’t even be able to sync correctly using USB 1.0 connection.

Any thoughts?

#2

Since USB is only 1500KB/sec I doubt you will have much luck. Burning a DVD at even 1x is 1350KB/sec. 1500KB/sec is the max supported speed and it probably has some overhead that causes it to go a little slower then that even… I doubt you will have much luck but you could always try I suppose. If you burner can’t burn at 1x then you won’t be able to burn DVD’s at all.
You should be able to burn CD’s at 4x (600KB/sec) or maybe 8x (1200KB/sec) though.

#3

So DVDs might be out of the question. The 200i shows “performance” of:
DVDs @ 2.4x to 8x and
CDs from 12x to 32x.

Those might be the read speed and I don’t remember what CD burn speeds were (I didn’t use is too much).

I heard that I can get a PCMCIA card w/ USB2.0 which would help and an external enclosure where it’ll allow me to plug into the wall and the usb port…

I’ll let you know how it goes,

thanks for the info!