Finally got a chance to try the setup I described above. Everything went without a hitch. Both the ripping to the external hard drive and burning from the external hard drive to the external DVD recorder using Firewire presented no problems. The speed during the burn was limited to a max of 8.2x. No problem ... just had to wait a minute & half for the burn to complete as compared to a 16x burn.

Attached are the results of Nero CD Speed scan.