EIDE burner or firewire?
 

Hi folks,

Brand new GL2 owner. Just got my Alienware PC which will be used for gaming and DV editing. Vegas+DVD is in the mail to me as we speak.

As someone brand new to NLE, I have a question regarding what type of DVD burner works best.

I am looking at Plextor as that is the ONLY type of burner I will use. They have both an EIDE(708A) internal, and a brand new 708UF, external firewire.

The Plextor folks tell me that transfer speed-wise, the two drives are identical. However, they say that for video burning the firewire is better due to a constant data stream while writing compared to the EIDE version.

Any opinions on this would be greatly appreciated!

Jeff Jordan

I'd say it'll usually be the other way around. Two reasons. Firewire
seems to eat CPU speed which adds extra overhad and not every
firewire card is that fast in my experience.

The firewire drive is usually a tad more expensive. So the question
you need to ask yourself is whether you are willing to pay for
the extra money and why you would do so. For example, if you
have a laptop it would probably be the cheapest way. Or if you
want your friends to use it as well, that might be another reason.

If you just want it for yourself then I'd go with the EIDE version.
But, you do need a spare IDE channel with preferably nothing
else on it.

But then again you can buy a nice Promise UATA 133 controller
for something like $40 which gives you two extra IDE UATA 133
channels [I've got one in my PC].

Yeah, if you're going to go with the EIDE version, you're going to want to put it on a channel by itself. This is mainly an issue for hard drives but I suppose it comes into play with burners: if you have two drives on the same channel, the speed at which data can be sent is limited by the slowest drive. Rob's suggestion of a controller card is a very good idea if you want to go the internal route. Otherwise, firewire is always a good bet!

The salesman is misleading you:
<<The Plextor folks tell me that transfer speed-wise, the two drives are identical. However, they say that for video burning the firewire is better due to a constant data stream while writing compared to the EIDE version.>>

If you are doing recording on the fly (real time) this might be true, but usually you burn project after rendering and encoding so EIDE is faster by no means.