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.
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.

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