External burner

[westla]

My SuperDrive died in my old MacPro, and since I'm going to upgrade to a iMac or MacPro black soon that doesn't have a super drive, I need a recommendation for an external CD/DVD burner.

I'm assuming I want a USB one, correct?

Any specific reccomendations? Are the OWC drives reliable?

[MIDI Life Crisis]

All I can say is don't waste your money on a light scribe drive. They take forever to etch. I think you getter fast throughput with FireWire or Thunderbolt drives. Write speed is important if you don't want to wait around. I've never used a USB burner but perhaps with USB 3 they're pretty fast.

OWC is a good vendor and they back their stuff. Also NewEgg is good to do business with.

[westla]

Thanks for the info.

No lightscribe for me.

I was thinking FireWire also, but Apple is getting rid of FireWire in the new iMacs and MacPros, so that makes me think USB is the option. Are there TB drives?

[HCMarkus]

USB3 is waaay more than plenty fast for optical drives. I think USB2 is, too, for that matter. Don't waste yer money with Thunderbolt... Optical is slooowww.

I have an external LaCie optical drive. FIrewire 400 interface, IDE internal interface. Its probably 12 years old. The original CD burner in the case died years ago. Bought a replacement Pioneer DVD burner (stock IDE PC internal part) and replaced the failed CD drive about 8 years ago. The Pioneer worked without hiccup until started to get dodgy some months back. Cleaned the lens, then checked the power brick, which was still original equipment LaCie, and found it couldn't put out the required 12v. Cut the connector off and replaced the brick with one from a retired external HD and we were back in business. The LaCie lives!

I love having my burner on my mixing desk. It sits silent until needed... don't have to run to the machine room to burn a disc for clients, and enjoy sweet silence when I'm recording and mixing.

[mikehalloran]

I know that some will disagree but this is Apple's recommendation and for good reason.

Do not get a FireWire only burner if your Mac has an Intel CPU. External booting from FW is not supported on Intel and often does not work (I support a lot of Macs as a side gig - I've observed this many times). You may notice that Apple only sells a usb burner - this is why. Most externals now are usb only or usb/FW so this is ok. Now OS 10.8 doesn't support external booting from a DVD anymore so this will really be a non-issue but still...

I have a a few burners but one has ports for FW400, FW800, eSATA and usb2. There is not too much difference among them burning DVDs, sad to say so I leave it hooked up usb and it still smokes the internal SuperDrive on my iMac. I have an eSATA port so I did get to check that.

Toast 11 supports simultaneous burning to multiple drives and I have several with FW and usb connectors so I was able to hold races as it were. FW was a little faster but not by much.

It also supports LightScribe. I went through one small platter of disks - takes 15 minutes burn, the disks are barely readable and they're too expensive - much more so than inkjet printables.
LightScribe only works via USB.