Why clutter up your hard disk with scanned or manipulated images? A CD Writer is a sound investment to back-up your other documents, spreadsheets and data files anyway. I forgot to back up my Turnpike email files and that's why I lost nearly a year of emails on my system a few months ago.
I used to use a Yamaha CRW 2000S SCSI rewriter. I learned an important lesson when writing to CD's, mainly that it is imperative that data transmission to the CD must be maintained. Failure to do so will result in the disk being thrown in the rubbish bin.
One problem in not having an IDE CD is that you may need to configure CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT manually on the Windows STARTUP DISK before installing Windows, so that the SCSI drivers for both the card, and then the writer, are installed.
By far the biggest failure in writing to CD is caused by having a fragmented hard disk, the head having to fly about all over the disk to retrieve the information from different tracks and sectors. Using SCSI drives all round helps to keep up the data flow rate. Some modern cd-writers now use "burn-proof" technology to overcome this problem (buffer under-run).
To overcome burn failures and provide my system with an IDE CD drive on boot up, I have now installed a second (Maxtor) hard disk controller and a Lite-On high speed CD re-writer.
For those without CD burn proof CD writers, frequent de-fragmentation with a large capacity hard drive is a pain, taking up to 12 hours on a 8 Gigabyte drive! A simple solution is to create a 1 Gigabyte partition, kept purely for writing CDs. Firstly, copy all the data to be written into this empty partition. Then write this to the CD. Once the CD is written delete all the files or reformat the partition ready for the next time. Adopt this method and you should not have to throw any more CD blanks away in future. Another help to reduce fragmentation is to have separate folder for Windows and Internet caching.
Incidentally, have you looked at the price of blank RWCD's, they are now available for only 30 pence more than standard CD's. Blank DVD+R and -R disks are also becoming a lot cheaper too.