Looking to buy a Dual Layer Burner- USB or Slimline?

[EngineBuilder]

Hello everyone, as the title says, I am looking to buy a DL dvd burner. I have a toshiba satellite laptop, and have considered purchasing either an internal slimline burner, or an internal 5.25" burner (for a desktop) and just putting it into a USB enclosure. There doesn't seem to be a price difference with either option, but I'm not sure of whether there will be a performance issue when using a USB enclosure.

I will be using this drive to make 1:1 backups of my (legally) purchased DVD's.

If any of you have advice when it comes to selecting a particular brand of burner, or advice concerning the USB enclosures, please submit it.

Also, whats this "lightscribe" technology all about? Has anyone had good results using these drives/discs?

TIA,
-EngineBuilder

[ux-3]

I have LiteOn slimline burners in all notebooks. They can burn DVDs, even DL ones. It feels good to know that I can burn a DVD everywhere. Have I done it? Oh yes, two times, to make sure the burner works.

Seriously, whenever I am going to burn something, I am hooking up a normal drive via USB adapter and burn on it. The quality is better, the burn is much faster etc.
My internal slim burners don't burn as fast as regular ones, despite the rating. They use Z-cav and start on 2.4x, even if they go up to 8x near the very end. And the have a lot more pie too.

I'd chose the external one, especially if you don't need to burn DL on the go. Just be aware that there can be issues with usb2 and external burners.

greetings
ux-3

[EngineBuilder]

Thanks for the reply, UX-3

Your response may have spurred more questions than it answered though... :confused:

From your response, I gather that you've used both the internal slimline DL burners, and the external USB 2.0 burners, and found that, performance-wise, at least, you found the USB burners to out-perform the internal slimline versions. Later in your response you allude to potential problems with using a USB burner- could you be more specific as to what types of problems I should be aware of?

I plan on using DVDecrypter to decrypt, and Alcohol120% to burn, unless there are newer programs that you might reccomend for the backup of legally-owned DVD's.

-EngineBuilder

[ux-3]

I used a seperate usb adapter and found that not all combinations and speeds work well. Apparently, many things depend on the chipsets involved. I finally managed to get a working solution. You can read about it here, though be warned, it doesn't start out as a success story.

http://club.cdfreaks.com/showthread.php?t=181208