[Jason Dunn]

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00004Y2P5/jasonsego

In my continuing quest to find useful tools for the book, I had requested a few items from ADS Technology. One of them was an external drive kit. The concept is that you can plug a hard drive in and it will bridge to your computer over Firewire. I didn't really clue in until I got it that you could add ANY sort of drive - CD/R, DVD-R, etc. Brilliant!



I was at Costco today, and they had the Panasonic LF-D321U (search for the lowest price) DVD burner there. What makes this drive interesting is that it supports DVD-R like the Pioneer A04, but it also supports DVD-RAM burning for data archiving. I wasn't sure how these two pieces of hardware would interact with my PC, but it worked like a charm. I mounted the DVD-R drive easily in the ADS case, plugged it into my laptop via an Adaptec PCMCIA Firewire adaptor, and I was off. Windows XP identified the DVD-RAM drive, and as I write this the 4.7 gig DVD-RAM disk is formatting in FAT32 format so I can use it like a hard drive. The entire process was smooth and painless.

What a beautiful, beautiful thing.

[Jason Dunn]

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00004Y2P5/jasonsego

In my continuing quest to find useful tools for the book, I had requested a few items from ADS Technology. One of them was an external drive kit. The concept is that you can plug a hard drive in and it will bridge to your computer over Firewire. I didn't really clue in until I got it that you could add ANY sort of drive - CD/R, DVD-R, etc. Brilliant!



I was at Costco today, and they had the Panasonic LF-D321U (search for the lowest price) DVD burner there. What makes this drive interesting is that it supports DVD-R like the Pioneer A04, but it also supports DVD-RAM burning for data archiving. I wasn't sure how these two pieces of hardware would interact with my PC, but it worked like a charm. I mounted the DVD-R drive easily in the ADS case, plugged it into my laptop via an Adaptec PCMCIA Firewire adaptor, and I was off. Windows XP identified the DVD-RAM drive, and as I write this the 4.7 gig DVD-RAM disk is formatting in FAT32 format so I can use it like a hard drive. The entire process was smooth and painless.

What a beautiful, beautiful thing.

[Jason Dunn]

Doesn't this just warm your heart? I finished formatting the DVD-RAM disc and was able to burn data to it easily - it's so cool that XP sees it as another hard drive!

[Rob Alexander]

That's a great idea for adding more drives if your IDE channels are already full. The only downside I've heard about these is that they appear not to get along with other Firewire devices for simulataneous access, like capturing DV directly to a drive mounted in this case. Whether that's a limitation of this device itself or the Firewire cards some people are using, I don't know, but it's good to be aware of the possibility.

[Jason Dunn]

Well, I haven't tried capturing video to it yet, but I am burning 4 gigs of video from a Firewire hard drive onto the DVD-RAM drive, also on Firewire. Talk about a torture test! With 8 minutes left to go, no problems so far. If this works, I don't see why a video capture capture wouldn't work.

[Jason Dunn]

Does anyone know much about DVD-RAM? I've tried formatting the DVD-RAM disc in FAT32 format, UDF 1.5, and UDF 2.0 - and my other Windows XP with a regular DVD-ROM drive can't read the disc in ANY of the formats. I thought XP had built-in UDF 1.5 support? I'm lost here - any advice?

[Janak Parekh]

Unfortunately, I don't think DVD-RAM disks are readable by most DVD-ROM drives.

After some searching I found http://www.fujifilmmediasource.com/d...1&hideimages=1. Knowing the DVD industry, I'm sure this is evolving, but it doesn't hold out well for your little project.

--bdj

[Jason Dunn]

Originally Posted by BigDaddyJ

Unfortunately, I don't think DVD-RAM disks are readable by most DVD-ROM drives.

Bloody hell! :evil: Thanks for confirming it at least.

[hyonj]

I'll second that. The DVD-RAM format is mainly used by businesses for storage. It can't be read by DVD-ROM or DVD-R/RW, or +RW either. It can only be read by another DVD-RAM drive. FYI, all the DVD-RAMs are not compatible either. It's kind of like th earlier versions of CD-R, they weren't all readable by other CD-Rs. :?

As for the external casing, you can find them cheaper at www.newegg.com. If one doesn't mind externals, they are a nice solution to laptops. When you sell the laptop, you don't have to upgrade and buy new peripherals.

[Jason Dunn]

Originally Posted by hyonj

As for the external casing, you can find them cheaper at www.newegg.com.

No doubt. But NewEgg doesn't have an affiliate program, and I'm thrilled when people support my site through my affiliate links like the Amazon one I used. Right? :wink:

[Terry]

Jason, et. al., take a look at the goodies here:
http://www.scsipro.com/catalog/pg22b...swapraid_2.htm