09-13-2007, 05:18 PM
Ramd®d,
Not sure if you were responding to my post, but I was referring to external DVD burners the same size *or bigger* than the mini itself as being a "negative" in my situation, but fine for someone who doesn't mind.
I don't know of any external optical drives in the "Ministack" or Mini form factor.
Performance-wise with the Mini I think there is something to be said for having an external optical drive AND hard drive. I find with built-in optical drive on my Mini that iTunes CD RIPs are heavily throttled on the earlier (inner track) songs... down to 5X to 8X. On the outer tracks, speeds get back up near 20X. I suspect this is because of noise concerns when the drive would have to rotate at higher RPMs on inner tracks to maintain the 20X read speed. External optical drives don't seem to have that problem... at least for me...
But again, for an elegant, tidy small profile device, having the SuperDrive built-in is a big plus. An external FW/USB hard disk for additional storage can be tucked out of sight, or even accessed via NAS if one has one of those setup.
Can't really tuck the SuperDrive out of sight, if one plans to use it regularly :}
Not sure if you were responding to my post, but I was referring to external DVD burners the same size *or bigger* than the mini itself as being a "negative" in my situation, but fine for someone who doesn't mind.
I don't know of any external optical drives in the "Ministack" or Mini form factor.
Performance-wise with the Mini I think there is something to be said for having an external optical drive AND hard drive. I find with built-in optical drive on my Mini that iTunes CD RIPs are heavily throttled on the earlier (inner track) songs... down to 5X to 8X. On the outer tracks, speeds get back up near 20X. I suspect this is because of noise concerns when the drive would have to rotate at higher RPMs on inner tracks to maintain the 20X read speed. External optical drives don't seem to have that problem... at least for me...
But again, for an elegant, tidy small profile device, having the SuperDrive built-in is a big plus. An external FW/USB hard disk for additional storage can be tucked out of sight, or even accessed via NAS if one has one of those setup.
Can't really tuck the SuperDrive out of sight, if one plans to use it regularly :}