external hard drives & cd-writing

Hello All:

I am looking into an external WD120 or Maxtor80 for additional storage for
my graphics and audio. This drive will be solely for data storage. Any
editing I do will be done on one of my internal drives. My concern is:
does anyone see a potential problem writing data or audio CDs using the data
stored on this external drive? I do not have firewire capabilities, so I
will be connecting the drive via USB2.0. My writer is an internal 8x DVD
writer and while I've not had any problems writing CDs using data from my
internal hard drives, I am concerned about the possibility of becoming a
coaster-manufacturer when trying to write discs using data over the USB
connection. Any thoughts on this?

Thanks,
Travis