Folks,

Apologize if this has been asked before ... did a search .. couldn't find anything.

I have a Dell D800 laptop and it came with a 60GB hard drive. However the disk is pretty full so making DVD backups on the disk is not possible.

I do have an external DVD recorder (Plextor 716A) in an external case (USB & Firewire). I also bought a 3-port Belkin Firewire Card (Cardbus). I was thinking of using an external firewire enclosured hard drive and connect it to one of the firewire ports and then use the second firewire port to connect to the external DVD burner. Then rip my movies to the external hard drive and then after ripping & transcoding, burn it to the external firewire DVD burner.

Anybody tried this setup and had success with it?

Ripping to the hard drive externally will take forever so don't waste your time. Look at my sig and you will see an enclosure that will get you to 16X with a DVD burner. They also have the firewire version from the same maker. If your case currently has the Prolific 3507 chip you can do the same. If it has the Oxford 911 it will be limited to around 12X or less.

chas, what makes you say that ripping to an external HDD will take forever? the bandwidth of the FW interface is plenty for a rip...

I rip to my external USB hard drive all the time! In fact I keep most of my movies on there so they're portable, that's usually my destination for DVD shrink. It keeps my hard drive uncluttered, and if I want to I can go to my friend's house and use his puter to rip, and come home to burn, that way we don't have to wait for two burns. Plus it keeps his hard drive free of clutter, and his burner isn't doing double duty. It doesn't slow the rip down at all, it rips just as fast to my internal hard drives. I dunno about other chipsets, but the cheapo Cypress chipset works great for hard drives. I get about 26 mb/s to it, and it's never given me trouble. I wouldn't use it for a burner though, or a DVD drive, opticals don't quite work right with this chipset. I have my maxtor 40gb hard drive stuffed in it, and I use it a lot! I dunno, I'd say go ahead and use it to rip to.

You know, now that I think about it you guys are right. All my experience with external HDs was with direct HD to HD copying and I forgot that the rip process is much slower. I have to eat crow and say I was wrong. The "forever" would only apply to copying.

yeah the 22MB/s theoretical top speed is much less than the 133 or 150 MB/s theoretical BW of an internal HDD so he should be just fine as USB2/FW usually gets around 45MB/s peak and 30-35MB/s sustained...

So I guess its okay to rip to the external HD...

How about burning from the external HD using the external burner? Anybody tiried it?

You know what ... I'll try it and post the scans of the burn if ever I am successful in burning the disc.

i think it should be fine...though i've never tried it myself...

i've got both an external burner and HDD but the burner is only 8x so probably wouldn't be very indicative of performance @ 16x...

The bandwith of USB2 or Firewire is probably not a great hinderance to the ACTUAL speed of an average hard disk - even if the interface is ATA133 or SATA150, the usable drive transfer rate is usually less than half that.

Chopping that USB/Firewire throughput between TWO drives does leave it close to the wall for 16x DVD - in fact, with overheads, it will probably hold it back slightly.

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.