Upgrade a CD ROM

How to decide if a CD Burner Upgrade is Cost Effective

Unless you are a hard core gamer running software that will not allow itself to be fully installed to the hard drive, CD upgrade or DVD upgrade just to get to a higher speed, is a waste of money. It doesn't matter if your current player is a 16X or an ancient 2X, there just isn't much to gain by putting in a faster drive. How often do you really reinstall the operating system, and how much of that time do you think is dependent on how fast the CD reads?

Adding a burner, or choosing to upgrade your CD ROM with a CDR or a DVDR is another matter, and if you need a recorder, it always makes sense to add one. You can purchase a CDR for less than $20 with rebates, and DVDR's are available under $40. The IDE drives are all backwards compatible, the main thing to watch for when buying a recorder is that it's supported by your operating system version. It's a pretty simple upgrade, 4 screws, the IDE and power cables, and the audio patch cable for playing music CDs, if you're replacing your existing CD drive.

Now that DVDR's are almost as cheap as CDR's, there's little reason to upgrade a CD drive with anything other than a DVD burner. DVDR's can record CD's, of course, so you aren't giving anything up. The new dual layer (DL) DVDR's double the capacity of the DVD, but you need special media, and will have the same reading issues that accompany all new technologys, in other words, don't expect your DL DVD to be readable in all drives.

The problem with a burner upgrade is always the software. There was a period of time a couple years ago where every single recorder I installed wasn't recognized by the recorder software until I downloaded a patch from the web. The software driver for a recorder is far more specific than the driver for a player, so every new model has to be explicitly supported by the software. The software that ships with the drive is manufactured by a third party, and the odds of it explicitly supporting your exact drive are pretty low if the drive is new and the software CD is more than a couple months old. That said, I've never run into a drive that shipped with software that wouldn't work AFTER getting the update from the web, it's just a minor frustration.

If you're planning to upgrade a burner with a faster burner, I wouldn't bother unless you are in the disc production business. If you can't record on your current drive at its top rated speed, the problem probably isn't the drive, it's more likely your system (see my troubleshooting charts). In short, defrag the hard drive and make sure you aren't running any other tasks when you record, and buy higher quality discs:-)

As noted earlier, you'll often have to remove your old player to make room for the 5.25" recorder, and some people worry this means they won't be able to make legitimate copies of CDs or DVDs. Untrue. I just posted an illustrated how to upgrade a CD ROM. All recorder software I've seen supports using the single drive to copy discs, it just makes an image of the original disc on the hard drive, then copies it out to a blank, as many times as you want. The process is usually faster and safer than attempting to copy from drive to drive, because the image is made while reading the disc at the highest possible speed and the hard drive transfer speed is always going to be higher than the player transfer speed. This process is less subject to the burps and spin-downs that can result in failed recordings when you try to copying between CD and/or DVD drives.

Illustrated Guide to replacing a DVD or CD drive