Need advice on cd-writer.

[boognish76]

I'm looking to get a new internal cd-writer to replace my PlexWriter 16/10/40. I want to get the fastest one available but I'm not too sure what the current state of the art is. A quick search showed me that you can get 52/24/52 writers but the most expensive ones seem to have firewire and I don't think my pc is compatible. Do I need firewire - can I write cds substantially faster with it? Do I know what I'm talking about?

[sft42]

Im not too sure about the firewire issue Boog but one of the big problems you'll find with burners of this speed is getting compatible media. Most are only available up to 40x so it might be well worth your while to just go down this road as the extra bit of speed in the 52x might not be worth the expense and possible hassle of compatibility.

[j2buttonsw]

Firewire is for external burners that can be used for both PC and MAC and you will need to fit a Firewire PCI card if your PC/MAC doesn't have one. Firewire has a very fast bus speed (400 MBit per second compared to 66 for a UDMA-66 HDD) but the bottle neck with CD burning will always be the speed of the writer. Thus, unless you want to share your burner, I would upgrade your internal drive to the fastest you can afford and wait for the blank CD manufacturers to catch up with you (as sft42 rightly says you are restricted to the speed at which the media can handle being burnt).