Optical Drives - is one enough

TheBazman

Hi

First of all excuse my terminology as I'm far from an expert

I am getting a new pc from Komplett as per earlier thread. Is there any reason why I would need an aditional Optical Drive. For some reason I feel that two might be useful, but not sure why. Also assuming I was to get an additional one, I would need to make sure that it is compatible. The mobo is :
MSI P965 NEO-F, P965, Socket-775, ATX, SATAII, GbLAN, DDR2, PCI-Ex16
which only has 1*IDE cable and 2*SATA cables.

1/ First of all should I go for :
ABIT IB9, P965, Socket-775, GbLAN, ATX, 4xSATAII, DDR2, PCI-Ex16
which has 1*IDE and 4*SATA cables
2/ The drive is
NEC DVD±RW burner AD-7173 IDE Black OEM, Dual, LabelFlash, Multirecorder(Ram) which uses IDE. Should I to instead for
NEC DVD±RW burner AD-7170S, SATA, Black (bulk) which uses SATA

This would allow me to connect up a second similar one if needed

Cheers folks

Anti

The abit board is good, and one sata optical drive will be fine. I have never used 2 at a time in my life.

DirkVoodoo

Disc to disc copying is handy, but with larger hard drives these days, its easy to copy a disc image on to your drive and burn it. So unless you are copying discs at a commercial rate, one is fine.

EDIT: 2 burners are pointless. I pilfered my old Philips DVD-ROM out of my dell and bought a NEC 3550 burner, but I could just as easily function with one. It is handy for keeping my two most played games in the drive bay

8T8

If it were me I'd just get 2 SATA one from Samsung & one from NEC.

Why ?

* Laziness in taking discs out of one drive to replace with another.
* Burning DVD sometimes odd media is better in one drive than another.
* Reading some drives fair better at reading certain discs than others.

TheBazman

Cheers guys - good advice there

I think I might get two SATA drives perhaps as you suggest 8T8, just because one may go on the blink which means I can carry on and just incase I ever want to burn data straight from one to another.

Also I'm inclined to think it may be easier for me to get them upfront as opposed to trying to fit later (given my lack of technical knowledge)

Deliverance XXV

8T8 wrote:

* Laziness in taking discs out of one drive to replace with another.

Hehe I use two drives.. one for "storing" my fifa 07 disc* and the other for Football manager*, both for quick access!!

*Not original intention

L31mr0d

had 2 optical drives before and the 2nd one might as well been used as a can of coke holder as I never used it.

As soon as I get a DVD or CD it is ripped to the PC, either as mp3's or an ISO. I have around 300GB's of ISO on the PC at the moment. Apart from burning a CD of music or a game for a friend, i hardly ever use the optical drive, and now that I have an 8GB USB stick I no longer use it for burning data to move between PC's.

c0y0te

Personally I'd always opt for 2 drives. Drive 1: DVD-ROM/CD-ROM, Drive 2: DVD-RW/CD-RW

I use the DVD-ROM (drive 1) for all games and apps installs because its faster than any RW drive, and I use Drive 2 for copying and writing etc.

There cheap as chips so why not give yourself options... especially when one of them goes tits up.. at least you always have the other to keep you going.

c0y0te

sharingan

8T8 wrote:

If it were me I'd just get 2 SATA one from Samsung & one from NEC.

Why ?

* Laziness in taking discs out of one drive to replace with another.
* Burning DVD sometimes odd media is better in one drive than another.
* Reading some drives fair better at reading certain discs than others.

The last point is a useful one.

I would add a 4th:
* If you import US movies you can set one DVD drive to Region 1, and another to Region 2, if you don't want to go reflashing the drives. If you have a good sound setup on your rig, it would be a good DVD playback system too.

Though in general 2 optical drives is a bit of an irrelevance.