Some ODD & USB questions

[themaddhatter]

Couple of questions for those in the "know"

- would a 16x DVD-ROM/24x DVD-RW saturate a dedicated USB 2.0 line (direct to computer; no hub involved)?
- anyone face issues with active USB extender cables & ODD rip/burn accuracy?

Essentially, I am looking to remotely mount an internal SATAII ODD outside of a computer 15-20 feet away. Looking at this route as all off the shelf USB external ODDs which I have found have a max ROM rate of 8x, while an internal is 16x, so copying data is noticeably slower.

So, I plan to put an internal ODD in either a USB 2.0 or 3.0 enclosure, run an active extension cable, and call it good.

Anyone ever do this? Good/bad/odd results? I could just by a USB 2.0 extender and try it out, but if it doesn't have enough bandwidth & I need to go to USB 3.0, I then reinvest in everything all over, and end up with gear I won't use otherwise.

Thanks in advance

 

[defaultluser]

Couple of questions for those in the "know"

- would a 16x DVD-ROM/24x DVD-RW saturate a dedicated USB 2.0 line (direct to computer; no hub involved)?

It would be close, but not quite capable of carrying the peak bandwidth.
DVD-ROM write speed for that drive is 1.32MB/s * 24x = 31.6MB/s

USB2 is usually only good for 20-25MB/s write speeds:

http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/usb-3.0-storage-charts/Copy-Benchmark-Images-Write,2282.html

You should probably go USB 3.0, but consider the following:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD-R#Speed

The difference in write time between 16x and 24x is less than 2 minutes. You might not care about maxing out the drive if a couple minutes do not matter to you. It will still be faster than the 8x max speed you can get on the typical notebook drive attached via USB 2.0.

 

[themaddhatter]

Thanks for the info. I will just do 3.0 and be done with it.

Active repeater extensions are a little pricey, but I prefer to "do it once & do it right"