[CRASH HARDDRIVE]

I just bought a Lite-ON 24x10x40x internal CD-RW mech today for $75 and put it in a $75 Firewire external case.

Basically I spent $150 for one damn good external Firewire package. (Actually getting $200 for it from the person I bought it for).

I'm almost loathe to hand it over, even with profit. I just burned several disks with it, and man it's fast!

For anyone considering a fast CD-RW, and wanting a great deal, consider the Lite-ON mech in an external Firewire case. This thing is blazing fast, fully Mac compatible, and about the least expensive burner mech on the market. My history with Lite-ON is good too, I've been using 12x and a 16x Lite-ON drives for several months without a single coaster to speak of with either.

The drive will only be recognized by Toast 5.0.1 and will only burn at full 24x speed if you update to 5.0.2 (otherwise it tops out at 16x). Luckily the 5.0.2 update is free for all oter 5.0 versions. iTunes works with it fine, but only after updating to Authoring Support 1.1.3. Disk Burner I'll try tommorow with my machine at work. Also dunno about OSX support, I've only used it so far with Mac OS 9.1.

Another nice feature I really like about Lite-ON burners, is that the drive trays are slotted, allowing the drive to be used turned sideways, a major space saving feature when using an external Firewire case. No problems burning or reading disks at top speed, with the drive standing on it's side.

Anyway, just passing info along. If fancy bevels with some company's name stenciled on some random drive mech is your bag, look elsewhere-- but if you like the idea of a fast external 24x burner for under $200, and have the mechanical skills to drive a few screws and plug an ATA cable and power connector in, consider this setup!

[Zoom]

Sounds interesting. Where did you find those two deals?

[G4ME]

also you can do this with 3.5 drive bays and create you own fire wire HD

[CRASH HARDDRIVE]

Cool, once Authoring Support 1.1.3 is installed, and you have Disk Burner and Toast on the same system, when inserting a new disk, you get a choice of preparing the disk for Disk Burner on the desktop, or a button to go into Toast and burn from there. I always hated that Disk Burner would want to hog any blank media inserted when I mainly use Toast. Very cool!

Originally posted by Zoom:
Sounds interesting. Where did you find those two deals?[/QB]

The Lite-ON drive is easy to find:
http://208.158.105.29/P_571.htm

Or check www.pricewatch.com under CD-Recorders

I picked the one I got up at a computer show where the best prices are always to be found.

As for the Firewire case, that takes a bit of shopping around. For the cases that will hold a full sized CD-RW mech, the prices have been dropping steadily for sometime.

I got mine for $75 at the same comp show, but online I've found them as low as $85 such as the one here:
http://208.158.105.30/P_501.htm

Put the two of these together, and you have an awesome external CD-RW for around $160 plus shipping. (Keep in mind you need to already own or buy Toast 5 also).

Yup, you can put a HD or any other IDE device in the same case, but I prefer the slimmer cases for Hard drives, such as can be found at places like www.fwdepot.com or www.cooldrives.com/firen.html

[CRASH HARDDRIVE]

BTW, an awesome external case for HDs that's slim, quiet, and contains a fan for cooling the drive. I've got one of these with a 41gig IBM 7200rpm HD and I love it! Note it's Oxfod 900 and not 911... meaning it supports ATA 66 transfer speeds rather than ATA 100 speeds, which unless I'm mistaken, Macs still can't take advantage of through Firewire anyway. At anyrate, the 900 chipset is fast enough that I use this drive to edit DV video from without skips or frame loss.
http://fwdepot.com/catalog/product_i...products_id=96