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My Laptop DVD writer is not reading drives any more, so I thought rather than buying a new internal, I should get new external writer.

The only thing I will be using that is to boot the Laptop or PC for re-installation of OS oe running Anti virus BOOT CDS.

I want to know how much will the performance issue.

Will the OS installtion will be slow with external DVD writer?

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Just FYI, it would probably be both cheaper and faster to use a USB flash drive instead of an external DVD drive. – Breakthrough Aug 26 '11 at 17:07
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4 Answers

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Yes you can. Make sure that you have enabled in BIOS the option to boot from other devices and adjust the boot order so that the dvd drive is accessed before the hard drive.

Performance wise, it depends on the speed of the dvd drive and the speed of the usb port you plug it into, but generally speaking, today I presume that your laptop has USB 2 ports and that would be a more than decent speed (30Mb/s maximum), therefore the bottleneck should actually be the reading speed of the dvd drive (aproximately 1,3Mb for each 1x .. that would be 13Mb/s at 10x read speed)

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I want to know what speed should be good for writing a DVD mostly I used 16x or 24x. – avirk Aug 26 '11 at 17:36
+1 For 1x and about its speed it will help the question owner to know the speed of Drive. Our answers were matching so you edited your. Nice work buddy. – avirk Aug 26 '11 at 17:40
@avirk : I remember back in the CD writing days, in some cases, if you wrote a CD at 48x and then you wanted to read it in a older max 24x reader it did not always work. I'm not sure if it also applies to DVDs but I know that as a good practice, if you want to make sure you have a good lasting and compatible DVD you should not write at very fast speeds – Ioan Paul Pirau Aug 26 '11 at 19:06
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up vote 2 down vote

It should be fine, I have done exactly that for installing various versions of windows and linux. It's not significantly slower than an internal drive.

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It depends data transfer rate of the external DVD driver... It may be slower but you can do whatever you do as your other driver sources.

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First of all its depend on the BIOS that is it support the external DVD writer or not? And also check that is your system support boot from USB drive or not? USB drives are much cheaper and faster media for boot and data transfer. So I would recommend you that if you have not need much data write on DVDs then use this option.
Then you have to change the Boot menu and set the priority according to your desirable media. You can set the USB DVD writer to first or USB drive to first according to your choice.

In my opinion boot from USB is much better performance than other source but you can't write data on CDs/DVDs. So if you need to write the data then you can purchase an External DVD writer. The External DVD writer model USB 2.0 has good speed(30-32 MB/s).

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