Newest Additions

For my birthday, Megan told me to order some things from my Newegg wish list -- without going too crazy. I decided on an internal card reader and a SATA DVD burner. Using a SATA optical drive will allow me to use the two larger IDE hard drives from our old computer on the single IDE motherboard connection I have to work with. I figured this was cheaper than springing a Franklin on a 500GB SATA drive, and it will give me 360GB capacity. This should be plenty, for now, until we fill it up with family videos or start using it as a PVR.

Here are the two products I chose:

Card Reader - the one from my wish list. It looks great with the black face plate, and includes a slot for microSD cards so you don't need an adapter. I ran a test downloading the same data from an Ultra II Compact Flash card using the reader and then our camera. I saw read speeds of ~9MB/s with the card reader. This is three times faster than downloading the photos using the camera itself.


DVD Burner - ASUS DRW-1814BLT - This drive is a perfect match for my system. It is the quietest drive I've ever (or never) heard. It's completely silent during DVD playback so you don't hear it during silent portions of movies. It also supports LiteScribe discs for burning your own labels on the disc face. What sealed the deal is that it included these features with a sub $30 price tag and free shipping. The only category this drive trails others at the same price point is that it burns at 18x speeds rather than 20x. But I'll trade an 11% slowdown any day to escape that constant purring that comes from those Lite-on drives that Dell stuffs in it's systems.