On Thu, 21 Aug 2014 17:14:49 Rohan McLeod wrote:
Russell that is very generous of you; I might try Trent's suggestion of coupling a R/W SATA burner to a SATA HD.
There is no connection between the burner and the HDD. In the unlikely event that you have a motherboard which supports it then you can run an IDE disk and a SATA DVD-RW drive without necessarily having any problems. The common case of a SATA disk and IDE DVD-RW drive (the default configuration for desktop PCs shipped ~3-5 years ago) also won't necessarily have any problems. CD/DVD writers are difficult, some just don't work for no particular reason. For my own use I don't bother too much about it, I always have 3+ PCs capable of doing such things and if one doesn't successfully burn CDs then I just transfer the ISO image to another.
These drives are definitely working or just possibly working ?
The drives all came from PCs that were known to work well. As I don't always test DVD drives before adding them to my pile it is possible that a PC had a damaged DVD drive and no-one noticed because CDs and DVDs aren't used much nowadays, but that isn't likely. It's also possible that a working DVD drive became non-functional after being on the shelf for a while (tested and known working drives have failed that way for me before). But if I give you 2 drives then you are pretty much guaranteed that one will work. If you want IDE then I can give you 3 to be even more confident of success.
Main problem would be the logistics as I have a permanent clash with the monthly LUV meeting; and the Beginners SIG is week-ends I seem to recall ?; when I'm often working ! Perhaps I should just try ComputerBank as they are just around the corner ?
It's up to you. Of course you could get a friend to attend a LUV meeting to collect drives for you. -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/