Well, the thing is that the one we have now is set up similarly to waht you say, but the IDE DVD-R drives are connected to the computer via IDE/FireWire converters, and the system doesn't see the drives. Only their software can see the drives. More importantly, it doesn't seem to understand any drives other than the ones they came with. So I worry that if I get a new system, I'll be locked into their hardware support again, which is not what I want.