Reply #6: I've done both. [View All]

[donco6]

For the money, and if you have an available bay, installing the drive into the computer isn't that difficult. If you can follow directions, you can do it.

If you can't do that, and you have an available USB port, you can buy a USB external drive, but it'll be quite a bit more.

You need a CD RW (read/write) drive - and for your volume, you don't need anything fancy. It should come with some software - I've tried others and find Nero Burning to be the best.

Once you install the software, it's a simple matter of setting up your writes - just drag and drop files into the write queue.

You can write the files directly from your CD originals, or you can "rip" them to your hard drive first - up to you. If you use file sharing software, you probably want to rip. But the RIAA is starting to sue people, so I'd think a bit first.

The only trouble I've had is during the tranfer process - sometimes the drive skips if I'm working online at the same time I'm burning. So I do one or the other. And I slow the write drive down to about 12X for a CD. Still goes plenty fast, and I don't have to do it over when I find a #$$%#@ skip.

Hope this helps.