Internal vs. External Optical Drive in terms of Speed?

[Theleb_Kaarna]

I have a sizeable (4000+) CD music collection which is continually growing and I'm constantly ripping new CDs into my JRiver Media music library. As a result, having a high quality and fast optical drive for the new PC build I'm planning is essential. Some of the cases I'm considering don't have an internal bay to support an internal drive, so if I went with one of them I'd have to go with an external drive.

So my question is, where's the 'bottle-neck' gonna occur if I get a drive with a 40x (or more) read speed? An internal drive's SATA 3.0 @ 6 Gbits/sec is obviously faster than an external's USB 3.0 @ 5 Gbits/sec, but will that matter? Will either of those options just be waiting on the drive anyways, meaning the drive's ultimately the bottleneck? Or is the drive (@40x or more) faster, making the cables the bottleneck (in which case I should go internal for the slightly faster rate)?

Thanks guys!!!

 

[greens]

CDs are incredibly sloooooow.
So slow i don't even want to talk about them, lets talk about Blu ray.
1x speed for blu ray is 36Mbits. A decent one can do 12x speeds...
That is only 432Mbits. The fastest optical media available can read at a snail speed of 432Mbits...

54MB/s... about as fast as a crappy USB 2.0 external.

You're talking about CDs though... which are like, 20-30 times SLOWER than that.
You could run NUMEROUS CD drives on a PATA Ribbon cable and not notice any loss of speed.

Optical media is dead.

 

[Susquehannock]

Shorter answer ... CD read speed is MUCH slower than the cable & USB 3.0 interface. Therefore an external will upload your optical stored data at the same rate as internal.

 

[Theleb_Kaarna]

Appreciate the responses guys, thank you!