A friend wants to put a Lite-on 48246S in an external 1394 enclosure. He lives on the other side of the country, and is not up to doing any debugging that might be necessary, although he should be ok to rig up the box and plug it into a well tested 1394 card on an XP system (XP Pro, but no SP1).

I've seen a number of posts on using external 1394 boxes for IDE HDDs, but nothing here on doing the same with IDE CD-RWs.

I'm most concerned about possible SW issues. Will various burner programs recognize the drive correctly? Do I need to flash it as some recognized 1394 CD-RW so it will work ok (as opposed to being a recognized IDE drive as a 48246S)? If so, any suggestions as to which FW to use?

Unfortunately, any real hands-on is impossible at this stage. He has the drive on the US east coast, and I'm on the US west coast. I installed his system, so I am familiar with it, and can walk him through most simple stuff and can use PCanywhere for Windows-based SW. If necessary, he could ship me the CD for DOS based flashing.

No external case has been selected yet, and advice would be welcome.

I'm also concerned about speed - Firewire should have enough bandwidth to allow writing at 48x without pause, but there have been posts wondering why their system doesn't write at full speed over 1394.

abe