[vsaraf]

Hi,

I had bought my White macbook in September 2006. At the time, I did not feel the need for buying a superdrive macbook and ended up buying one with a combo drive. With my increasing collection of songs and Movies, I really need an external DVD writer but am not able to find one thats in my budget. Most of the DVD writers out there in the market do not mention "MAC" in the system requirements. The ones that do are too costly for me starting at 129.99 (LaCie). Can someone suggest me a good DVD burner which has all +/-R-RW (single and dual layer) writing capability? And possibly a link to the place where I can Buy it.

Thanks,
Varun

[Big Mac]

I would look on dealmac.com.

[kretara]

You could buy an external USB2/firewire 5.25 case and put a DVD-RW into it (Pioneer 112 is a good, inexpensive drive).
This would run you about $70.


You can also find lacie drives on ebay pretty cheap.

[vsaraf]

When I talk about an external enclosure and an internal DVD writer, which one needs to be compatible with Mac? the Enclosure, the internal DVD writer or both??

[kretara]

Originally Posted by vsaraf 

When I talk about an external enclosure and an internal DVD writer, which one needs to be compatible with Mac? the Enclosure, the internal DVD writer or both??

The DVD-RW is the biggie. OS X will recognize many DVD-RW's and Toast will recognize many more, but some just can't be seen by either.
The Pioneer DVR-112D works just fine with OS X. I put one in my G4 iMac when its old superdrive died.

As far as an external enclosure. If you are going with usb2, then you don't need to worry. I have yet to see an external usb2 enclosure (with supported drive inside) that OS X could not see. The same goes for windows. I would be wary of the cheapest enclosures. I have seen the cheapies fail fairly often.
Something like the Macally PHC-5008 -- $32 (USB2 only) would work fine.

If you want firewire, you need to be a bit more picky. Do you best to get an Oxford firewire chipset. It will cost you more money, but it will be much more reliable.
Something like this AMS Venus -- $50 (firewire and usb2) enclosure or this ADS Pyro -- $35 (NOTE: THIS IS FIREWIRE ONLY) would work fine.

Getting a USB2 enclosure should be just fine.

[walkerjs]

Originally Posted by kretara 

As far as an external enclosure. If you are going with usb2, then you don't need to worry. I have yet to see an external usb2 enclosure (with supported drive inside) that OS X could not see. The same goes for windows. I would be wary of the cheapest enclosures. I have seen the cheapies fail fairly often.
Something like the Macally PHC-5008 -- $32 (USB2 only) would work fine.

If you want firewire, you need to be a bit more picky. Do you best to get an Oxford firewire chipset. It will cost you more money, but it will be much more reliable.
Something like this AMS Venus -- $50 (firewire and usb2) enclosure or this ADS Pyro -- $35 (NOTE: THIS IS FIREWIRE ONLY) would work fine.

Getting a USB2 enclosure should be just fine.

Back before I had a Macbook with a Superdrive, I used our 'office DVD writer', which is a Sony firewire/USB2 external DVD burner with my combo-drive equipped Mac Mini. I used firewire the first half dozen times or so to burn DVDs when I had posession of it, but one time I thought I'd try it with the USB. OS X recognized the drive just fine, but midway through the burn, it failed with some cryptic error and made a coaster. So I switched it back to Firewire and it was fine from there.

Haven't tried using USB on my Macbook with that drive, but only because I have a Superdrive so I haven't needed to. Maybe I'll do a test burn tomorrow when I'm back in the office with my Macbook.