Question USB 3.0 Optical Drive?

[1405]

I'm needing to replace my old usb 2.0 optical drive. Will there be any speed improvement if I go to a usb 3.0 drive this time, or is the old optical drive tech too slow to see any improvement? (Mainly used for data, not video or music.)

 

[Lutfij]

If all you have access to is USB 2.0 ports, then no, you won't be seeing an uplift in data transferred/burned onto the disc using said optical drive. If you do have access to USB3.0 headers or ports, then you can see an uplift in data transfer.

 

[1405]

If all you have access to is USB 2.0 ports, then no, you won't be seeing an uplift in data transferred/burned onto the disc using said optical drive. If you do have access to USB3.0 headers or ports, then you can see an uplift in data transfer.

Wow. Didn't know that. Thanks for the insight. Yes, I have access to USB 3.0. And in one case USB 3.2 gen 2.

 

[BFG-9000]

Doesn't this depend on the type of optical drive?

If you have the fastest ever made multibeam 72x CD-Rom drive, it only moves 10.8MB/s

If you have the fastest DVD-burner at 24x, well that's only 33MB/s which is well within the capabilities of USB 2.0. Note that most drives which can burn up to 24x speeds can only read them back at 16x or 18x--due to something about not wanting to stress the discs to over 10,000rpm more than once to keep them from cracking. Though discs actually exploding in drives was more of a CD problem as those could spin up to 24,000rpm and even a new, flawless disc would start to come apart at 27,000.

If you have a Blu-Ray drive that can only spin up to 8x then that's 36MB/s and considered the limit of USB 2.0.

So if you have USB 3.0 ports or better, and want a Blu-Ray drive that can burn at faster than 8x, then a USB 3.0 drive will allow you to burn discs at up to the current fastest 16x. However as with DVD the read speed is generally limited to slower, in this case usually for noise reasons because most people use their Blu-Ray drive to watch movies when they don't want a howling drive next to them... so you could spend a bunch of money for no improvement when reading data discs.

Used to be there were drive utilities such as Plextools to slow down DVD reading from 16x to 1x for this reason.