Since I have an EOS 350D I produce quite a lot of data. I used to backup the photos using an old Yamaha 4x SCSI External CD-Writer. I really had to be very patient and do nothing else on the machine while writing the CD.
This was taking to long and I had been looking for an alternative quite some time. I didn't want to backup my pictures on a DVD because of the problems I keep hearing about degrading DVDs which are no longer readable after some time. CDs have this problem as well, but seem to keep their data much longer as burned DVDs. But when I started looking for a new drive I noticed that the price difference between a CD-Writer and a DVD-writer is not that big. So I could not resist the temptation and got myself a DVD-writer.
What a difference burning an full CD with 40x compared to the old 4x writer. Only problem is that in a relatively short time I managed to get enough pictures for 10 CDs. Better start buying them in larger amounts on a spindle.