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Obviously good for a small form factor notebook.

How much slower are external's like this for the average person usage? Installing games etc etc.

Don't jostle the drive at all while burning or you'll get coasters. It took about 3 or 4 tries last night to get a non-coaster. Also, when burning, use the extra power plug.

#1, what gave you the first clue?

#2, if you are worried about speed go with a full size drive.

"As far as we know, effective rate reaches at 40MBps or 320Mbps for bulk transfer on a USB 2.0 hard drive with no one else is sharing the bus."

A 16x DVD hands out data at a max rate of about 21MBps, so the drive itself would mostly be the bottleneck.

I can't tell if there is any speed difference in RL use.

Yeah, and this thing is not "giving power via the USB cable", but drawing power most of the times.

just what I need to make the 1000HE a laptop
Knock Knock.
Who's there?
Bacon.
Bacon who?
.

I have had one for 3 months now, and no coasters. Obviously you don't move the drive around while burning. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure that one out. Also, I have never had to use more than one USB slot to burn a DVD. My Dell laptop provides enough power to make it work fine. In fact, I am getting a second, simply because not having to carry around a "brick" power supply is worth the slightly slower burn speeds.

How often do you really need to take an optical drive with you, or install games that are large files so a one-time installation speed is a concern but the game is undemanding enough it would play well on lower spec portable systems that lack an optical drive?

Jostling the drive involved closing a desk drawer smoothly while burning. I think the cable may be a little loose, perhaps it's just on my unit. BTW, I'm on an asus netbook, it may have a little less power than your "Dell laptop", but using both plugs increases the completion rate of my burning.

I'm really glad you're getting another one, and that this unit has worked out so well for you spohnsoftware! It hasn't been that great for me, and I'm not even a rocket scientist! Thank you so very much for your help, sir! Excuse me while I take care of this nasty nausea I have developed...

Slightly bigger than the Sony I got last year. Of course, the Sony's power brick negates the savings and a lot more.

These things are quite a bit slower than desktop-type drives, simply because they consume so much less power and thus have drive motors that can't spin the disk as fast. I've had one for nearly a year now and have never burned a coaster. I use both USB slots on my Dell Latitude D420.

dave_c
that was one terrible run-on sentence

Dang, missed out on this one. Should've waited a lil more, but I needed an external for my netbook and ended up paying twice this much for another.

Another cheap option if you just need a quickie install & have an internal drive laying around: ide/sata to usb adapter.