Advice on replacement optical drives...

dfilerdfiler
Posted:
in General Discussion edited January 2014
Recently, the dvd-rom drive in my dual 450 has been on the fritz. It fails to mount discs most of the time now. Instead it sits there with the access light lit until a reboot. Given the age of this machine, I?m weighing replacement options carefully. The machine has been outfitted with a couple 120gig drives, 1.5G of ram, some SCSI devices, and a radeon 8500 so it still has a bit of life left.



I currently use an external firewire 16x cdrw from Formac. This means that I could probably get by with a cheap replacement dvd-rom drive. However, I?m also interested in backing up data to dvd and possibly using iMovie/iDVD.



Opinions on the cheapest and best dvd burning solution for this setup?

I?m interested in thoughts on whether it is better (or possible) to drop a burner into that firewire case.

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 3
    709709 Posts: 2,016member
    You can still find the Pioneer DVR-A04 around for about $150US if you don't mind not being able to burn 4X DVDs. Otherwise, go with the Pioneer DVR-A05. You can find it through PriceGrabber for a couple hundred bucks.



    I dropped an A04 into my Dual533 a year or so ago, and it works like a charm (in Jaguar...in OS9 it hung my system every time I put in a DVD \ ).



    [edit]: Here's the link to the DVR-A04.
  • Reply 2 of 3
    dfilerdfiler Posts: 3,420member
    Hmmmm.

    DVR-A04 = $160

    DVR-A05 = $200

    (both new)



    Upon returning home today, I'll check on the brand and model of the stock DVD drive. If they're down to 40 bucks, this could be a difficult decision.
  • Reply 3 of 3
    709709 Posts: 2,016member
    Right. You can get a DVD-ROM drive for dirt cheap. But if you want to make DVD data backups and/or iDVD discs, you'll need one of the Pioneer drives. The A04/A05 models are also 'officially' sanctioned by Apple.
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