MacBook internal optical drive vs an external one

Hi everyone,
I'm busy ripping a bunch of dvd's for a friend of mine that's going of to Afghanistan on my macbook and I was wondering if an external optical drive would be faster then my current internal combo-drive for reading the discs.

(BTW all the dvd's are his and he's just trying to put all of them on an hard drive so he can watch them while he's serving in the war.)

I think it would depend on the external drive speed. The Macbook DVD specs are listed here and it says you're reading the DVDs at 8x. The external drive would need to be faster than that. You've got to think also that the bus speed of the external drive would factor into it's "actual speed".

Unless you've got money to burn, I'd probably just stick with what you have. Even if you have extra cash burning a hole in your pocket, it's probably not worth the hassle anyways.

externals are always gonna be quicker. they are bigger, and allow for more "performance".

just nature of small vs bigger parts.