Adding Dvd burner; need advice
 

I want to add a dvd burner. What's the best way to configure this?

I have a hardware setup on my pc as follows:

epox ep-8RDA3+ motherboard with AMD 2800 (installed October 2003) which has 2 EIDE channels. I have a 250M zip drive and Lite-On CDRW drive as master and slave on the secondary channel, and a
wD 160GB hard drive on the primary channel.

Whatever I put on the channel with the hard drive, won't that slow the hard drive down? How about a PCI based EIDE controller card? Newegg has a cheaper Koutech and a more expensive Promise card. Both are designed for RAID use. Only the Promise card specifications says that it handles ATAPI drives.

I need this to be compatible with debian linux and windows.

Thanks.

Why don't you remove the CDRW and replace it with the DVD burner? You can still burn CDs in the DVD burner. Actually, if I had to drop a device, it would be the zip drive... Just my opinion.

Yes, I've considered that, of course, especially if the controller card is expensive. I do not think that I will be needing both the CDRW and DVD burner at the same time as I do not currently do any CD to CD copying. I am reluctant to throw anything "useful" away. Also, the CDRW has 52x read speed, which would be faster than any DVD burner I am considering buying now. With the DVD burner installed I would be reading "read only" disks on the CDRW and burning data backups on the DVD burner.

My wife wanted the zip drive. She has old stuff on Zip disks that she wants to be able to read and I suppose update from time to time. If you can convince my wife to get rid of the zip drive without damaging my marriage, you're w-a-a-a-y beyond my capabilities.

1) Casually mention to wife you might have heard the Click-Of-Death from the ZIP but you can not be sure.

The following day, do this:
2) mkdir /home/wife/zip-stuff/diskx (wher x is a number)
3) mount /dev/{zip} /mnt/{zip}
4) cp -R /mnt/{zip}/* /home/wife/zip-stuff/diskx/
5) umount /mnt/{zip}
6) Repeat from step 2 as necessary.
7) Burn /home/wife/zip-stuff/* to CDRW
8) Present CDRW to wife and Viola! You are an instant hero for preserving her data from the evil click-of-death! Oh yea, you also now have an open controller for your new toy! ;)