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General discussion

One Drive or Two?

Apr 17, 2005 1:16AM PDT

I'm getting ready to buy a new computer and this is my first time getting a DVD/CD burner. Is there any significant advantage to getting dual drives, that is, one drive that does the burning and another to read from (CD or DVD)? Or is it just as good to have one drive that stores the contents of the disk I'm copying in memory or to the hard drive, and then copies it to a new disk? Thanks.

Discussion is locked

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My opinion only
Apr 17, 2005 6:12AM PDT

Either will work. You can burn from disk images just fine but it's one more step. Disk images are good if you are making multiple copies of something. If you want to duplicate your software collection for backup purposes, having a read and a write drive will make things go faster. CD and DVD ROM devices are so cheap I think it's worth having one of these as well as a burner.

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Cost Issue
Apr 24, 2005 10:48PM PDT

If it were me I would have 2 just in case I ever needed them!

It all depends on whether or not you want to pay for 2, 1 will certainly do the job, but burn processes on DVD's can take some time, sometimes I like to listen to audio CD's etc whilst burning a DVD, I could not do this if I only had 1 drive, but then again you could make the point that saving the audio tracks to the HDD is an option. In the end it is entireley up to you!