Hi all,

I recently purchased a Norcent external cd-rw drive (EW 480) off ebay, thinking I could swap the cd-rw for a dvd-r/rw (hp 420i) I already own.

So when I received the drive, I got my trusty phillips screwdriver and started to take apart the enclosure... only to find out it still wouldn't come apart after all the screws were removed. There was even a warning sticker (voided warranty warning) to remove in order to get to the last screw, which makes me think the enclosure is actually "openable". I tried prying it open in all kinds of ways, but nothing would do. (BTW, I'm not completely retarded when it comes to tinkering with electronic equipment, so I did try all the obvious ways of opening it!)

I didn't want to damage the enclosure, so I decided to contact Norcent and ask them how I could get it open, explaining that yes, I understood it would void the warranty, but I didn't care since the purchase was made on ebay and wasn't covered anyway. They still would't help me, saying it is against their policy.

So here I am now, after searching the web for a solution without success. I thought maybe one of you "cdFreaks" might have a clue!

If it helps, I can post pictures of the enclosure...

Thanks in advance,
Ben

Is it really possible to replace the CD drive in an external drive with a DVD drive instead? I have a 2 1/2 year old external CD-RW that I dont use anymore and was wondering if I could turn it into an external DVD-RW drive.

I have read a lot that it is difficult to get a DVD drive to write at 16X using single layer disks if used in an external enclosure. What about when writing dual-layer disks? What is the maximum speed that can be reached when writing a dual-layer disk over say USB2.0 or Firewire?

The current fastest speed for dual layer is 4x. This is no problem for external enclosures and will be written at 4x (USB2 or FW)

How do I find out the data transfer rate of my external USB 2.0 CD-RW drive. I want to swap out the CD drive and replace it with a BenQ DW1620 but I need to find out what the speed of the connection is to determine if I can get decent buring speeds if I do put in a DVD drive.

If you have a spare IDE HDD, try HDD first to find out about its performance. HDDs are better for testing. CD writing is too slow to make the full use of USB 2.0 connection. USB 2.0 has maxium bandwidth (not speed of independent device) of 480Mbps which is about 60MB/s. 52x CD never reaches 10MB/s. Even the worst USB 2.0 case can allow at least 10MB/s and most USB 2.0 cases on the market today allow at least 20MB/s, though not over 30MB/s. If you want to use 16x DVD writers, just try it because you are not going to many media hitting 16x speed. But if you want to burn YUDEN000T02 and MCC004 at 16x, get the latest IEEE 1394/USB 2.0 case.

Could I do that? Since the enclosure was originally part of a retail external CD-RW drive, would it still work if I put in an IDE hard drive instead of an optical drive? (I do have a spare IDE HDD that I could use for that purpose)

Thread closed in an attempt to consolidate and organize all the external enclosure threads. Please make any new posts in this new thread, where you can also read more about this consolidation. Please feel free to PM me if you have any questions or concerns about this closure/consolidation. Thank you for your understanding in this matter.