With a CD writer at say 24X or 48X the time difference for burning a 700MB disc is only a few minutes, however the time difference between 4X and 8X for a 4.7GB is substantial because of the volume of data.
Buy Now...
It should be possible to burn up 4.7GB of data in a little over ten
minutes, given that only a few years ago it took much longer than that
to burn a CD-ROM then you can see the advances. Of course why should we
need to burn up this amount of data, this is entirely due to bloatware
- badly written packages - that we are all lumbered with using. The
data is there and data in the most important community we have.
Worst case scenario your hard disc crashes and nothing is
salvageable then you need to purchase a new hard disc, reinstall all
your applications and remember all your passwords. That's the hard bit
done or do I mean the easy bit? Now simply feed back in your data. The
stuff that fitted on a floppy disc or three not so long ago, then maybe
a Zip drive or a CD-ROM, now of course 700MB is probably not enough.
Lastly you spend the next few weeks fine tuning to get all those
settings back the way you like it.
Now comes the crunch most people do not backup - I will do it tomorrow - or - I did it last month - neither is good enough.
A DVD writer is probably the only way you can be safe today. I
remember a backup I did some years ago that ran to 135 floppy discs,
each disc took over a minute that's best part of three hours. Zip
drives and CD's worked but still people found excuses. A dedicated
drive for total mirroring of data - nice idea I'll do it soon - how's
the lucky rabbit's foot?
Not long ago a 2x DVD cost a lot of money and or course there are
several standards - oh good another excuse not to get one - wait until
the battle is won. Finally the media was very expensive I remember
discs that cost £12.50 each, a little over a £1 now.
Finally I will tell you about the Liteon DVD R and RW unit that is
both + and - this means it reads and writes almost everything around
and yes it still works as a CD and DVD reader. It can write CD's at 40x
and has a 2MB buffer and the software provided prevents buffer under
runs. If you use RW discs of either + or - then the maximum writing
speed is halved to 4x.
Fitting is just a matter of locating a free 5.25 inch bay and
fitting it in, the screws are provided as is an audio cable. However
not a power lead splitter so hopefully you have a spare one in your
case if not go to a local computer fair and buy a power splitter lead
for a pound or so. Set the jumper correctly on the back of the drive
and connect to the EIDE cable that's it. Windows will find the unit on
next boot (you did do all this with the PC switched off didn't you?)
If you do not have a spare bay then you must remove a current drive
but as the Liteon does everything it should be no loss, the price of
the drive is less than a CD writer was only months ago.
The software provided is Nero DVD suite (also writes CD's) and
CyderLink Power DVD5 for viewing DVD's. www.dabs.com have this unit
available for £55.
!!
