I have a nice Dvd writer in my PC that doesn't get used as the PC isn't set up at present.
I'd like to use it with my laptop, but the only 5.25" enclosures with esata I can see cost more than he drive did.
I need to use this existing drive because it has certain, um, capabilities. Anyone know of any cheap caddies? Or should I just use the connectors from a cheap caddy and laser cut a case for it all?
Why esata? usb should do fine for a dvd writer.
I don't want any cheap nasty USB circuits getting in the way between imgburn and the drive.
Plus I have an esata port doing nothing right now :C
Bizarrely, my PC hasn't been switched on for quite a while. It was all fine last time I used it. Booted it up today and there's all sorts of browser toolbar hijacks going on, windows has decided it's not genuine, and I can't connect to the tight Vnc server at all. Da Fuck.
Just pointing out you will not notice any speed advantage with esata for anything less than hdd or ssd, certainly not for optical drives, especially not a writer. Usb enclosures are way cheaper, apparently a concern?
Not so much for throughput, but latency. These discs are hard enough to get to burn right as it is.
What are you trying to burn? I've not had a failed write since the 90's in the bad old days of Nero and having to disable screensavers etc.
Fucking buffer underrun :(
Some stuff Jim asked me to do for him.
8.7 Gb on 8.5 Gb dual layer discs.
I remember years ago we went to Glasgow to a computer fair. On the way back our train was delayed because one of the trains going into Waverley had failed to stop and crashed into the buffers.
We /genuinely/ found it utterly /hilarious/ that for once our day had been ruined by a buffer overrun. (fail)
I don't think I ever managed or bothered to do what needs to be done now with the overburn.
I was tempted to get an optical disc emulator thing then stick the isos on a USB drive. Not sure if it's a waste of would actually make me use it more regularly.
I was doing fine with over burn, but lately (maybe last 12 months?) all my discs fail. Put them in and it says Play Game but with no name/icon, many starting them causes the screen to go black (like it's stsrting) but then crashes back to the desktop.
So for £50 there's a guy across town that'll install the RGH stuff. That's not much more than the cost of setting up my DVD drive to use with my laptop and getting some more discs (only got 3 left), plus I can run homebrew.
Is it still compatible? I remember you saying it was banned from Live so probably hasn't been updated beyond the maximum dashboard version.
The RGH thing works on any dashboard. My banned one had rrod a few years ago (it's fixed but not being used). My second one never went online (except on the day I got it to get the divx license thing), but was stolen. My third and current one has never been online since being flashed.
Picked the box up tonight, and while Freestyle Dash certainly has some very rough edges, it's remarkably capable and intuitive.
So far I've ripped some games from original DVDs, transferred some via (FAT32 :S ) USB hard drive, and FTP'd some Arcade games over. Not really practical on wifi given the size of these things.
I think the next step is to replace the 60gb internal drive with something a bit more modern and throw all my discs out.
Not looked into home brew or emulators yet, that can wait for the weekend.
So you believe it's worth it?
For the convenience factor alone, yeah.
You can swap out the internal drive for any size you want now. Not sure if I'll do that or just plug an external one in (easier for copying things across).
I wonder if XBMC has been ported...
Can you even remove the drive from the external caddy thing? I have an original shape model.
Yeah, you need torx 10 and 6 to get into it, and it's just a standard 2.5" drive inside. If it's a full height drive (12.5 mm?) you're putting in then you need to bend off 4 retaining clips, but no biggy.
I have a phat one. The slim ones can only take 9.5mm high drives from what I've seen.
And does yours now have a chip of some sort?