One hazard with the external burners: Both your computer and the burner need to use USB-2, or you're limited to rather slow burn rates. If either is to the older USB spec, about 8x (real) or 12x (specsmanship) is the best you'll get. With USB-2 on both ends of the wire, you can go about as fast as the internals.

There are also quite a few reasonably priced "DVD R/RW" units on the market that will let you burn either CDs or DVDs, but there's a little pain with the pill. Since the DVD writes the dots a lot closer together than a CD burner, the spindle speed is usually limited to the speed at which the laser can keep up with a DVD burn, so a lot of the "really fast" DVD R/RW burners burn CDs at rather slow - 8x to 12x speeds.

Also note that not all DVD burners can burn CDs - you've got to look for the "R/RW" and the "Compact Disk ReWritable" logo (trademarked) on the front panel. If you're mainly going to use only CDs, and want the best burn speeds, you're probably still better off with a plain old CD-R/RW burner - forget the DVD stuff.

If you have a whole lot of very large files - as in a lot of hi-res photos and such, you can burn a "data DVD" with up to about 4GB on it, so it's tempting to go that way. At present, I only have one machine that can read DVD, so I've stayed with the 700MB I can cram onto a data CD.

The bundled software usually has about as much to do with how many coasters you'll make as the hardware, but almost all the "common" burners come with Nero or EasyCD. Nero (ROM Burning) seems a little more stupid proof for audio CDs, but I much prefer EasyCD for data CDs. They're different enough that I put both on my current machine, for the different usages.

John