I know this doesn't involve software, but I didn't know where else to ask. Is an external drive much slower than an internal CD-RW drive going through a USB port? I have no clue what the bandwidth limitations of USB ports are, so I'm kind of curious. I was thinking of getting an external drive so I could take it to me with band practices and do some recording from my drummers computer. Is the portability worth it, or is there some kind of buffer limitations, or are external drives more prone to errors? Anyone who has experiences or knows, please let me know. I doubt there is much of a difference, but just incase I'd like to know. Thanks in advance, Justin

I have an external Iomega ZipCD. That is all I could go with since I have a laptop. It works fine for me, I've never had any problems and it doesn't seem prone to errors for me. Brian

Nothing particularly against external USB CD-RW except you'll probably struggle to record at better than 8x so make sure you get a Burnproof writer. Forget Parallel port devices. Now Firewire is a different subject altogether !

I have an HP 8200 CDRW drive (External). It works well, and I've never had any problems with it. The only thing is that with External drives (with USB), you can't get really fast recording speeds. I believe external drives with a USB connection can do max 6X. Internal drives on the other hand can do faster speeds (8X, 12X, 16X, etc.) The only reason I got an external drive was so I could easily use it with different computers. It's so handy!