Question about Mini(me)

I'm going to get a Mini but had a couple questions. I'll use it for all my digital stuff, photos, music and video. Is the Apple Superdrive that nice, or will a cheap NEC external burner do just as well? Do the 40 and 80 gig drives run at the same speed? I'm having a hard time deciding which model and features to get, while keeping the price in the Mini range.

Thanks.

I have an external burner and you can basically do everything with it that you can with a superdrive.

Apple try to limit external burners and by default they don't support burning from iTunes, iPhoto, iDVD or the Finder.

But with one free simple app, you can enable all that with one click of your mouse, so it's no big issue really. (the app is called patchburn 3 btw)

Not sure about your hard drive question, interestingly enough even the apple store's technical specifications don't give any drive speeds, so I'm guessing they're both 5400rpm.