Sure someone can help,

I'm in the process of trying to buy a portable USB (1.1) CD re-writer for work, can anyone advise on the maximum write speeds available??
Someone has told me the max is 6x, any ideas if this is correct or can I get something faster?? I know I can get a faster USB 2.0 one, but don't have a USB2.0 port, is there any way of converting an existing USB 1.1 port to 2.0?

Thanks in advance.

Steve

If you have enough room in your pc you can fit a USB2 card. Can't remember how much I think they are about £30.

if you are using USB 1.1, the max speed you can get out of an external USB cdrw is 4x.

USB 1.1 gives a theoretical max speed of 12Mbits/s, which is 1.5Mbytes/sec, or '10X' in CD terms. This is a theoretical absolute maximum, so the best you can hope for in practise will be around 6 to 8X.

You can always plug a USB 2.0 device into a USB 1.1 port and vice versa - it just won't work at the full speed of which USB 2 is capable (480Mbits/s).

A USB 2 card will be very cheap but might cause trouble if your OS doesn't support it. You need Windows 98SE at a minimum, and expect to need a driver upgrade on any system.

Thanks for that, I will look into getting a convertor for the USB 1.1 port to get a bit more speed.

Cheers

Steve

Thats right. Firewire is better if you can as it has much higher data transfer rates .


AllanB

Not true. Firewire is 400Mb/s, USB 2 is 480Mb/s. In practise there's probably no noticeable difference, but I'd go for USB simply because every PC has it.