[putana]

I'm not sure if this is a good idea or not but was hoping maybe someone here had already done it


The plan was to buy a DVDROM & CDRW Drive seperately and then add a DVD-RW drive later. However this is wasting a bit of money doubling up on things and will also consume valuable IDE Channels.


I was thinking of getting a Pioneer A05 DVD-RW drive instead. I would then have the ability to read/write CD & DVD all in a single drive. This would only require one IDE channel and also require less power which is ideal.


Can the A05 drive be made multi-region? I need R1, R2 & R4


Does anyone see any problems with this idea?

 

[putana]

I take it this is not a good idea or no one has done something like this even with an older generation drive like the A03 or A04 ?

 

[Salmoneous]

I have a A04 as my only optical drive. Works great as CD/DVD player/burner.

 

[Kirby]

I've gone to having only a single drive also...the sony DRU500A ... pretty much does it all.


Kirby

 

[Jeff D]

I'm in the same boat, although I've got two drives currently hooked up. One is a Philips DVDRW-228 and the other a IOMagic CDRW4848. My thinking was this... The DVD+RW drive is more expensive and slower than the CD drive. I could use the CD for cd only stuff, ripping, cds, etc.


I configured the DVD+RW as secondary master and the CD as secondary slave. Then I noticed problems. The CD drive doesn't work that great. I wasn't getting more than 10-12x on reads. I discovered DMA wasn't enabled on the secondary slave. I can't even configure it to DMA, so I'm stuck.


Switching the CD drive to master enabled DMA and got me 48x read speeds. The problem is I really want the DVD to be the master. The DVD also NEEDS DMA enabled to work well. I'm not sure why secondary slave can't have DMA enabled. (I'll search on that) EDIT (in case anyone else needs it... hints on fixing DMA problems can be found here .


I'm also unsure what to do about this problem. I really want both drives...


Another problem has to do with the sound card and digital connections, my Santa Cruz card has only one audio-digital in. That is connected to the DVD for DTS and DD 5.1 playback

 

[dm]

I think the biggest problem is you will have a problem finding region free firmware for burner DVD drives. DVD read speed is not an issue for DVD movie playback. Digital out from the drives typically is preferred to go over the PCI bus, so limited inputs into the sound card does not appear to be an issue to me.

 

[Jeff D]

DM, Odd, I just kinda assumed the digital connection to the sound card was actually being used.... I see no reason why it would need to be.

 

[JDC]

I still have a cd-rw, and a 104. I keep the cd-rw because it burns at 24x, and 104 only burns at like 8x. I want to keep my dvd-rom in but I needed room for another hard drive, cause the dvd-rom rips faster than my dvd-rw.