# Why Get Two DVD Drives In One PC?



## Bryan R. Tyler

Hi,
   I was wondering what would be the reasons behind getting two DVD drives (either two burners or one burner and one player) put in the same PC.  I've read that recording on the fly from one player to the burner is usually a bad idea.  I'm having one made and I was just curious if there was any reason I should have two DVD drives rather than a DVD burner for one and a CD player or burner for the other.  

Also, a DVD burner is capable of burning CDs as well, isn't it?  If so is there any reason to have a DVD burner/CD burner setup rather than a DVD burner/CD player one?  Thanks!


BTW, I apologize if this thread has been done before.  The subject words were too small or common for the search engine to find, and I didn't see another thread like it.


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## Yeti

Generally its a matter of convenience more than necessity.  If you watch movies on your computer and have a movie thats two discs you can watch the whole thing without changing discs.  The same thing for installing programs with multiple discs.  Burning on the fly may not be good, but most programs are able to detect the recordable media and automatically burn so you don't have to change around anything and you can just let it go.  Personally I have a DVD burner and a DVD/CDRW and I like it but I could also live without that setup


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## Praetor

Reasons Why:
1. DVDROM is dirt cheap. If you do extensive variable speed operations on the drive, that wears down the motors. Better to kill a cheap drive.

2. DVD Burners suck for ripping DVDs. They can do it but uber slow. Granted you can get around this with a firmware hack but its potentially easier to do it via a DVDROM

3. You can rip multiple movies simultaneously.


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## jancz3rt

*And...*

You may also wanna save your burner for burning only and extend its lifetime. I did the same with my CD-RW drive. I have  CD-ROM drive for readong and the RW drive for writing. So far so good. I think that doing what I did is also applicable to this situation being discussed. 

JAN


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## Praetor

> I did the same with my CD-RW drive. I have CD-ROM drive for readong and the RW drive for writing.


Not so much with CD drives because:
1. CD technology is quite mature, a burner costs a whopping $5 more than a ROM
2. ROMs are not capable of performing any EFM ... a critical requirement of making proper backups of protected media ... so if you do a image dump on a ROM ... good luck getting it to work if its anything newer than SafeDisk V1/Lite. Of course, this is not to say that just any EFM capability is sufficient....


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## Bryan R. Tyler

Cool, thanks for the help guys.  I'll go for the extra DVD rom.  Maybe this is a silly question, but DVD +/-RW drives don't write CDs any differently (i.e. better, worse) than CD -/+RW drives do, correct?


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## Praetor

Yes and no. For 99.9% of people (i.e., those that have no idea what EFM is and why it's important for making backups) then the answer is YES, there is not much difference. For those interested in making proper 1:1 backups and such, most DVD burners lack high quality EFM and thus backups are not feasible (there are exception drives like the Plextor PX708+).


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## Bryan R. Tyler

Praetor said:
			
		

> Yes and no. For 99.9% of people (i.e., those that have no idea what EFM is and why it's important for making backups) then the answer is YES, there is not much difference. For those interested in making proper 1:1 backups and such, most DVD burners lack high quality EFM and thus backups are not feasible (there are exception drives like the Plextor PX708+).



I'm glad I asked.  I'm having a new computer made by Compaq (don't kill me   ), with its main focus to be recording and copying music demo cds.  I looked up some info on EFM, and since I don't know which particular drive would come equipped with it (couldn't find that info on their site), would it be safer to assume that the CD -/+RW drive it would come equipped with would more likely be a 2 sheep burner than the DVD -/+RW drive they offer would be?


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## Praetor

Hehe you did you do your research  Unfortunately, if you have an OEM machine, odds are you have a 1-sheep or (less likely) 0-sheep burner. There used to be some databases about sheep ratings and stuff (i used to maintain one on CD-RW.org but that's disspaeared i think) ... if your drive's name is "ATAPI CD/RW" or some generic name like that then there's not a hope in hell it's a 2-sheep drive. 

Most OEMs use LG drives or similar makes ... specifically for LG, they have like 1 (maaaaaaaaaybe 2) drives that are 2-sheep (none of them recent); similar brands are spec'd similarly


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