This burner adds the luxury of a dedicated harddisk drive, by taking advantage of dropping harddisk prices. An extra pre- burning step is added to the burning process, where the user uploads files to be burnt beforehand to the dedicated HDD. Once the files are on the HDD, the disk is burnt and checked for errors solely by the burner.
Benefits include the ability to unplug the burner from the PC (if it's external) once the files have been uploaded. Also, it reduces the risk of buffer underrun errors or PC slowdown because the burning process does not compete with the rest of the PC for resources such as CPU clock cycles and the PC's main harddrive.-- rhatta, Aug 07 2005 Some more features I can think of:
Idle-time DVD pre-fetching. When a DVD is in the drive and the PC is not accessing it, it copies the contents on the disc sequentially to the dedicated HD for faster reads in the future. This avoids slowdowns caused by randomly reading the DVD directly, which includes the time it takes for the optical lens to move back and forth on the drive as well as the time it takes for the disc to spin up to speed.
Virtual DVD/CD-RW drive. Chanages made to the disc are copied to the dedicated HD, but changes are not reflected on the rewritable disc until the last moment, in order to reduce read/ write/erase counts to the DVD/CD-RW disc.-- rhatta, Aug 07 2005 I don't dislike the idea so I'll stay netural but it would seem easier to just keep along the current path of increasing the buffer size in dvd burners. With dual layer burners common place and blue ray on the way I dunno if there'd be any great return of investment in baking this. Harddrives fail more often than dvd burners as well so this would likely lower the units lifespan. And I'd feel happier buying a larger multipurpose harddrive. You can easily buy a 200 gig drive for 100 euro these days.-- Cubical_View, Aug 07 2005 Do you know how difficult it is to buy a HDD as small as 4.7GB?-- AbsintheWithoutLeave, Aug 07 2005 Pioneer PRV-LX1?-- bristolz, Aug 07 2005 random, halfbakery