Interface Cards & Controllers

What Can External DVD Burners Do?

External DVD Burners are portable burners that can read, write or rewrite CDs and DVDs for storage or sharing. Unlike internal drives, they can be moved from computer to computer and use an external power source.

Depending on the software used, a burner will:

* Make Photo Discs
* Make Read-Only Music or Audio CDs
* Burn Home Movies
* Create Back-up Copies of Media Library
* Utilize Re-Writable Discs
* Play DVD Movies or CDs
* Convert Formats
* Back-up Data Files
* Create Karaoke Discs
* Share Slideshows
* Print Unique Disc Labels
* Play DVD-ROM or RAM discs

External DVD Burners: What to Look for

When choosing a DVD burner, ports are important aspects to consider. Look to see whether your computer has a USB 2.0 or 1.1 or FireWire port then choose a DVD player that will work with that port. Keep in mind that a USB 1.1 is extremely slow and that ports can be added at a reasonable price. If you use a unique disc type, such as DVD-RAM, CD-Text or CD+G look to see that these formats are supported.

Feature Set
We evaluated all of the features available with the DVD burner such as whether they have the ability to copy to dual layer discs and if they are compatible with popular DVD copying software. We also looked at what kind of software package comes with the hardware and noted the types of ports they require.

Burner Speed
Burning speed is especially significant when choosing a DVD burner. However, the type of blank media used to read/write/rewrite also impact speed.

Help & Support
This ranking depends on how quick the product manufacturer responded to our email inquiries about their product. We sent an email to the technical support team of every product we reviewed. This criterion also considers some of the other help/support contact methods available such as live chat, telephone, FAQs, a searchable knowledge base, troubleshooting guides, easy driver downloads, etc.

About the Author

Tushar Virani

External Hard Drive – What To Look For?

I remember when having an external hard drive was a luxury and they were big cumbersome things you had to plug into a socket. Now everyone seems to have one and they have become a crucial part of our home life, used to backup our important data and provide storage for the gigabytes of photos we now accumulate throughout the year.So what should you look for in an external hard drive? Below are some points you need to consider:

Disk Space
This is the obvious thing you need to consider when looking to buy an external hard drive, how much it can store, it doesn't matter if you want a pink external hard drive or a brushed steel one, it needs to have the right amount of storage.The problem is that most people tend to buy a disk, which has much more storage space as compared to their requirement, just because bigger disks are available.While you could get a 2TB external hard disk from Amazon.com or other sources for as less as $120, 2048GB worth of storage space is much higher than the storage requirements of most people.Better way is to consider the space that you would actually need and then select a disk, which is one size more than your expected requirements.That will stop you wasting money on storage you will never use.

Power
You should also consider on how the device gets the power for functioning.A variety of the smaller disks, which store up to 500GB come with the option of using the USB port to meet its power requirements, thus making the device highly portable and convenient.The larger drives require more power though and they need you to plug in an adaptor to a socket, which makes them harder to use and a lot harder to transport around, particularly if you use yours with a laptop.

Software
You'll find different drives come with different software and you need to make sure you get one that suits your needs.For instance, you have backing up software, which can backup the data on your computer and store it in the external hard drive. Also, the software does incremental backups, to ensure minimal disk space utilization and keeping the data up to date with the main drive.However, these backup software solutions do have some issue when you want to selectively take a backup of your content, and often need to be configured properly to get proper behavior.

Information about both the drives and the software and the drive specification details, can be obtained by searching on websites like Amazon.com.Then check out the reviews as well to see what other people think about the reliability of the unit and how useful the software actually is etc.

 

Can I use a USB external hard drive on a router without a USB port?

I have an external hard drive with a USB cable which I want to use as a network hard drive. My router, however, does not have a USB port; only ethernet ports. Is there any way I can connect the hard drive to my router, like through an adapter of some sort, for example?

Your router is missing more than just the USB port. Routers that will mount a hard drive have more to them than just a USB port. It has the ability to run a session that manages the hard drive connection. You can buy that as a seperate device that has a USB port, a Cat5 connection and the ability to run the management program.

Here's and example of one:

http://www.simpletech.com/products/storage/simplenet/simplenet.php

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