I have a two year old Dell Dimension 4100, Pentium 3, 1 GHz. I would like to replace the Sony CD R/W SC148C drive unit with a LG DVD R/W GSA 4160B drive, relegating the Sony drive to a slave position. The specification for the LG drive recommends use of a Pentium 4, 2.4GHz or better. What will happen if I buy and install the LG unit? Will it work, work at less than half speed? Are there any other hidden incompatibilities? I am not interested at this stage to download and record films and videos, only data storage. I realise the ideal is to purchase a new computer but a state pension puts this out of the question for a long, long time as there are other priorities. Being a elderly newby to computing I ask for your assistance. Thanking you all in anticipation of your replies.
It will work. Doesn't really matter what your processor speed but it will work. Just very, very slow. My friend has a pII at 233mhz. It takes him 8 hours to burn a dvd. I would suggest buying a USB 2.0 Hard drive instead if you really need storage.
Actually it won't work slow at all.. The only reason that the LG DVD-RW drive recommends a 2.4Ghz or better is due to the fact that they are expecting you to be "ripping" & encoding to a different video format: example: .avi or .wmv ie "copying" a dvd from your DVD-RW to your hard drive - and whilst its doing so encoding your copied DVD data to a "compressed" format (ie it will be ALOT smaller insize say: 8GB to 700MB), then from your hard drive to a DVD-R or DVD+R DVD.. And Pentium 4's are the best for Encoding, and so they say a 2.4Ghz Pentium 4 is recommended (basically for encoding). The slow bit being the "ripping", although a 1Ghz PIII shouldn't really have any problem with this at all, you should get quite a reasonable speed. Your best chance of making the "copying" to your hard drive as quick as possible is to have a fast hard drive, ie: 7200RPM 2MB Cache or better (preferably 8MB). Obviously DVD's are very big in size (about 8-12GB in raw unencoded formats) so if you intend on storing them on your computer a large hard drive is recommended. :good: Basically your speed of "ripping" or "copying" is merely limited by the transfer speeds between your DVD-RW/CD-RW and your hard drive, as your CPU/memory can transfer more if not equal that of which "maximum" your transfer speed is of your storage media (DVD-RW/CD-RW -> Hard Drive). Where as if you are going to use something like XCopyDVD or something like that ie: a piece of software that will copy your DVD AND encode it at the same time.. the copying is not the slow bit.. its your Encoding.. Where as if your just copying from your DVD-RW to your hard drive, then straight back onto a Dual-Layer DVD-R or DVD+R CD, your fine.. but encoding will take Alot longer. Hope this helps
