DVD update

So, with permission from my lovely wife, I went ahead and bought that DVD burner from Newegg. If my date-crunching abilities are on, it should be here on Monday. Total spent: $65. That includes S&H, three GB (3x1GB) memory cards for the little one's media player, and a stack of DVDs. Now the only thing I'm concerned about is whether to just add the DVD drive or replace the existing CD-RW.

Simply adding the drive has a certain desirous quality to it. I have a free 5 1/4" outward-facing bay open, and the power supply is more than capable of handling a second optical drive. Bsides, since this is technically a "combo" drive[1], it would make certain procedures much less painful and disc swapping a more palatable alternative.
But to do that, I'm gonna need to grab a new IDE cable, right now I have a Single and a Double, and I'd need two doubles (I remembered this only after I put in the order; thankfully, dad has a room full of such cables, I bet that I can swipe one). [2] Hopefully, this won't mess with my setup too much... I have things working pretty much how I want them, and this may mean a half hour or so of changing symbolic links. That is one thing that I will give Windows; the relative ease of adding new hardware[3]. We'll see what I can figure out between now and when it comes in.

[1] It can write to a number of different media types, notably here (multiple formats of) DVD and CD.
[2] There's probably a specific name for them, but I don't know it. The one's I call "single" have two connectors - one on each end - and let you attach a single drive; the "doubles" have three connectors, to attach two drives to the motherboard.
[3] I like Linux, and I prefer to use Linux. But I'm not a zealot; I can and will admit when something else does something better. And assigning locations to devices by UUID (and having the OS recognize them) is something that I have more experience on Windows than on Linux systems [A]

[A] Gods do I have experience with it. A tip for all of you setting up Windows networks; Assign network drive letters closer to Z than to E. Hotpluggable devices - digital cameras, flash drives, basically anything that Windows treats as a hard drive - starts assigning drive letters with D. And manually assigned network drives are dealt with second, but take operating precedence. In other words, say you've got a hard drive (C:) and a CD drive (D:). Then you mount a network share (Map Network Drive) as E:\.
Now, plug in your digital camera. You'll get the found new hardware, and it'll attempt to autoinstall. And it will automatically mount the camera as the next drive. The mounting routing, however, doesn't check for mounted network shares; so the memory card in your camera becomes E:\. But, since the network drive assignment takes precedence, the drive designation (E:\) is taken back by the network share. And you can't find or eject your camera. Great jorb.{i}

{i} The way to fix that is by right clicking My Computer, Manage...; and then going and reassigning the device to a new letter.