Maybe Apple should consider renaming these drives - SubStandardDrives, not only due to their 'alleged' lack of reliabilty, but also for their glaringly absent BluRay playback/recording capability.
Good one! Of course the original SuperDrive was the 1.44 MB floppy disk drive that could read Mac and PC formats. Funny how they used the same name for a DVD burner.
Only buy the good stuff. I've been using Taiyo Yuden for years and had not ONE failure!! I am on a 2006 MBP. I get it only from supermediastore.com - free shipping.
That is a great reference! Thanks for the info! Looks like Verbatim is top-notch as well, especially for Dual Layer media!
"Verbatim DVD-R and Verbatim DVD+R DL are our top suggestions for the ultimate in disc quality, as Mitsubishi-made media have been a consistent high-quality performer since 2001. Taiyo Yuden media is an excellent second choice."
I have the same issue on my MacBook Pro (was the first one with the PC processor). Actually it is getting a bit old, so I thought it was linked to that. While installing the Snow Leopard, everything went fine, until it rebooted and failed to read the disc. Since that time it does eject all DVD drives and has issues with some CD as well. I had to make a dmg image of DVD on an iMac and restore it on an external hard disk, from which I made the installation. Guess, I will call the support ...
I've been on the aforementioned thread over at apple discussions for a while and I am certain the majority, if not all, of the users experiencing the SuperDrive failures are having a problem that is not related to Snow Leopard at all. The fact is, many people do not use their drives that often, and many only learned they had a problem when trying to install SL from the DVD.
Not related to Snow Leopard? You may be partially correct, my son's MacBook had super drive issues, we always have to press the eject button before putting in a disk. Now in Snow Leopard, the eject button doesn't work, you have to go into the Disc burning section of the System Profiler before you can insert a disc.
I am really glad we paid the price premium for top quality manufacturing...
Maybe Apple should consider renaming these drives - SubStandardDrives, not only due to their 'alleged' lack of reliabilty, but also for their glaringly absent BluRay playback/recording capability.
I doubt that has anything to do with the drive. I think it has to do more with them not including the draconian DRM policies of the whatever association deals with Blu Ray.
Most of you miss the obvious. The slot-load drives are crap. Too many mechanics involved in loading the disc, etc. They are prone to failure at some point. Has nothing to do with Snow Leopard or Rosetta (SL has native Intel drivers). It was just a coincidence that people discovered their drives didn't work when they tried to install a new OS, because the article mentioned that most don't use the drive that often. Has nothing to do with the SL DVD.
I agree that this seems to be nothing to do with the SL DVD (more likely that's the first time in ages that people have used their drive), but the fact that slot-load drives are crap doesn't change the fact that:
a. they need to last the warranty period and
b. in the UK at least they need to meet "fair use" requirements for five years.
I doubt that has anything to do with the drive. I think it has to do more with them not including the draconian DRM policies of the whatever association deals with Blu Ray.
... or maybe it has everything to do with the dictatorial Apple business model wherein Apple always decides what best for the customer to have (or not have in their computer), regardless of what the customer actually desires.
Any honest developer worth a lick would know the driver for these two drives requires ROSETTA. Install Rosetta from SL's DVD or from Apples site and the issue of burn support goes away.
For those still on 10.5 and has an older Mac with the Hitachi or Mashusta drives (Pioneer's are in the new units which run an Intel driver).... Choose "Customize" before you select install and click "Rosetta".
Edit: This was found by me 3 weeks ago and reported to Apple, as well as two forum posts.
Wrong answer. I have two mid 2007 intel Mac Pro's and a late 2008 MacBook Pro and successfully installed Snow Leopard on all three AND Rosetta on the two Mac Pro's. Right after that the the two "OPTIARC DVD RW AD-7170A:" super drives in the two Mac Pro's stopped reading discs. I could not install the new iWork DVD that I just bought because neither one would read the DVD where both had just read the Snow Leopard DVD just days before. On the other hand, I did NOT install Rosetta on the MacBook Pro and its drive is working just fine. It is DEFINITELY Snow Leopard related.
I've been on the aforementioned thread over at apple discussions for a while and I am certain the majority, if not all, of the users experiencing the SuperDrive failures are having a problem that is not related to Snow Leopard at all. The fact is, many people do not use their drives that often, and many only learned they had a problem when trying to install SL from the DVD.
I took mine into Apple and had the drive replaced under AppleCare. (It's worth noting a few users reported that using a disc cleaner or compressed air solved their issue.)
I used my drives in my two mac Pro's regularly until Snow Leopard killed them.
So it is not limited to drives by Panasonic? seems Hitachi-LG are also affected!!
My drives in my mac Pro's are OPTIARC DVD RW AD-7170A which doing a google brings up made by Sony... unless you are saying that Hitachi is making these for Sony?
I recently had my superdrive in my 15" MacBook Pro swapped out. I had it for a few months and it read CD's and DVD's fine but when I went to back up things before installing Snow Leopard I had problems. I had not installed Snow Leopard at that point. After installing Snow Leopard the problem remained and I ended up getting it replaced at the Apple store. I believe mine was the Sony.
Apple should just roll Applecare into the prices of their products. Those too cheap to buy it are the ones screaming the loudest when something fails out of the one year warranty period.
Or, Apple could actually address the problem. Like in changing brand, or changing whole design.
Most of you miss the obvious. The slot-load drives are crap. Too many mechanics involved in loading the disc, etc. They are prone to failure at some point. Has nothing to do with Snow Leopard or Rosetta (SL has native Intel drivers). It was just a coincidence that people discovered their drives didn't work when they tried to install a new OS, because the article mentioned that most don't use the drive that often. Has nothing to do with the SL DVD.
I use an external FireWire Pioneer SuperDrive because the full size drives are faster, quieter, and rock solid. No cheap mechanisms to fail when loading a disc. There were rarely any drive failures when Apple used the 5.25 size drives. Even my AppleCD300i still works in my vintage LC 575.
Even this thread has an ad for Mac SuperDrives starting at $37.99. What do you expect for a $37 drive? The other issue with burning is finding DVD media that can burn well, especially dual-layer. Memorex DVD DL+R are ones to avoid. I get so many failures with that media.
Exactly my point. I think Apple is sacrificing too much for good looks.
I know slot loading looks cool, but compared to being able to easily eject jammed disk, clean lens and even replace whole unit in a few seconds if faulty... for me, that beats the crap of "looking cool".
That is a great reference! Thanks for the info! Looks like Verbatim is top-notch as well, especially for Dual Layer media!
"Verbatim DVD-R and Verbatim DVD+R DL are our top suggestions for the ultimate in disc quality, as Mitsubishi-made media have been a consistent high-quality performer since 2001. Taiyo Yuden media is an excellent second choice."
I believe Verbatim is doing a lot of re-branding, using others' media - mostly Ritek and Mitsubishi, to my knowledge.
That being said I had - and still have - a good go with Verbatim and "native" Ritek, but TDK and Sony as well, who ever is doing their media.
I've had no issues with with either the drive on my old 17-inch iMac from '06 (still in use), or my 2008 MBP.
In any case, I can't wait until Apple decides to just yank out these optical drives a la Macbook Air, and just make them available as a separate add-on. But optical media is still something enough people want, so it'll be a while . . .
I'm slowly coming around to this reasoning. I just got an 8GB flash drive for $19 at Best Buy. I wasn't shopping for one, but when I saw it I couldn't believe I didn't have one. My 2008 MBP drive died, I posted about that when thread was running here last month(?) or so. It had nothing to do with Snow Leopard installs tho.
For "needing" a replacement, I really maybe have used the drive twice since then, and once was to install SL. So if they did away with it the only thing I'd really need it for is software installs. I guess I could just take an image of the disk on my Mini and install over the network, too. But an external option would be just fine in those cases.
I installed SnowLeopard on six macs and all were ok but one of my newer imacs. I thought it was the superdrive. Then i used the superdrive to install the softward on a lace rugged to use as a boot disk. I called my cousin over and replaced the hard drive. It then installed fine. Oddly enough the iMac that had problems was the only one we used with boot camp and had partitioned the hard drive to do so. My cousin said the hard drive was what was bad. I wonder if the other folks that are experiencing issues were also users of boot camp?
I had the HL-DT-ST DVDRW GSA-S10N in my 2007 MacBook Pro, and It failed. Brought it in to Apple and had it replaced. It slowly started to not recognize a disc inserted into the drive. It would spin for a few seconds, I'd hear a beep, it would spin again, and repeat the process up to 5 times before spitting the disc out. It doesn't do it anymore, but I worried down the line it may start doing it again.
Also, my Battery on this MacBook Pro has failed 3 times in 2 years. Anyone else having that problem?
Comments
Sounds like a bad situation...
Maybe Apple should consider renaming these drives - SubStandardDrives, not only due to their 'alleged' lack of reliabilty, but also for their glaringly absent BluRay playback/recording capability.
Good one! Of course the original SuperDrive was the 1.44 MB floppy disk drive that could read Mac and PC formats. Funny how they used the same name for a DVD burner.
http://www.digitalfaq.com/reviews/dvd-media.htm
Only buy the good stuff. I've been using Taiyo Yuden for years and had not ONE failure!! I am on a 2006 MBP. I get it only from supermediastore.com - free shipping.
That is a great reference! Thanks for the info! Looks like Verbatim is top-notch as well, especially for Dual Layer media!
"Verbatim DVD-R and Verbatim DVD+R DL are our top suggestions for the ultimate in disc quality, as Mitsubishi-made media have been a consistent high-quality performer since 2001. Taiyo Yuden media is an excellent second choice."
I have the same issue on my MacBook Pro (was the first one with the PC processor). Actually it is getting a bit old, so I thought it was linked to that. While installing the Snow Leopard, everything went fine, until it rebooted and failed to read the disc. Since that time it does eject all DVD drives and has issues with some CD as well. I had to make a dmg image of DVD on an iMac and restore it on an external hard disk, from which I made the installation. Guess, I will call the support ...
Patrick
I've been on the aforementioned thread over at apple discussions for a while and I am certain the majority, if not all, of the users experiencing the SuperDrive failures are having a problem that is not related to Snow Leopard at all. The fact is, many people do not use their drives that often, and many only learned they had a problem when trying to install SL from the DVD.
Not related to Snow Leopard? You may be partially correct, my son's MacBook had super drive issues, we always have to press the eject button before putting in a disk. Now in Snow Leopard, the eject button doesn't work, you have to go into the Disc burning section of the System Profiler before you can insert a disc.
I am really glad we paid the price premium for top quality manufacturing...
Maybe Apple should consider renaming these drives - SubStandardDrives, not only due to their 'alleged' lack of reliabilty, but also for their glaringly absent BluRay playback/recording capability.
I doubt that has anything to do with the drive. I think it has to do more with them not including the draconian DRM policies of the whatever association deals with Blu Ray.
Most of you miss the obvious. The slot-load drives are crap. Too many mechanics involved in loading the disc, etc. They are prone to failure at some point. Has nothing to do with Snow Leopard or Rosetta (SL has native Intel drivers). It was just a coincidence that people discovered their drives didn't work when they tried to install a new OS, because the article mentioned that most don't use the drive that often. Has nothing to do with the SL DVD.
I agree that this seems to be nothing to do with the SL DVD (more likely that's the first time in ages that people have used their drive), but the fact that slot-load drives are crap doesn't change the fact that:
a. they need to last the warranty period and
b. in the UK at least they need to meet "fair use" requirements for five years.
I doubt that has anything to do with the drive. I think it has to do more with them not including the draconian DRM policies of the whatever association deals with Blu Ray.
... or maybe it has everything to do with the dictatorial Apple business model wherein Apple always decides what best for the customer to have (or not have in their computer), regardless of what the customer actually desires.
Gotta Love That!
Any honest developer worth a lick would know the driver for these two drives requires ROSETTA. Install Rosetta from SL's DVD or from Apples site and the issue of burn support goes away.
For those still on 10.5 and has an older Mac with the Hitachi or Mashusta drives (Pioneer's are in the new units which run an Intel driver).... Choose "Customize" before you select install and click "Rosetta".
Edit: This was found by me 3 weeks ago and reported to Apple, as well as two forum posts.
Wrong answer. I have two mid 2007 intel Mac Pro's and a late 2008 MacBook Pro and successfully installed Snow Leopard on all three AND Rosetta on the two Mac Pro's. Right after that the the two "OPTIARC DVD RW AD-7170A:" super drives in the two Mac Pro's stopped reading discs. I could not install the new iWork DVD that I just bought because neither one would read the DVD where both had just read the Snow Leopard DVD just days before. On the other hand, I did NOT install Rosetta on the MacBook Pro and its drive is working just fine. It is DEFINITELY Snow Leopard related.
I've been on the aforementioned thread over at apple discussions for a while and I am certain the majority, if not all, of the users experiencing the SuperDrive failures are having a problem that is not related to Snow Leopard at all. The fact is, many people do not use their drives that often, and many only learned they had a problem when trying to install SL from the DVD.
I took mine into Apple and had the drive replaced under AppleCare. (It's worth noting a few users reported that using a disc cleaner or compressed air solved their issue.)
I used my drives in my two mac Pro's regularly until Snow Leopard killed them.
So it is not limited to drives by Panasonic? seems Hitachi-LG are also affected!!
My drives in my mac Pro's are OPTIARC DVD RW AD-7170A which doing a google brings up made by Sony... unless you are saying that Hitachi is making these for Sony?
Apple should just roll Applecare into the prices of their products. Those too cheap to buy it are the ones screaming the loudest when something fails out of the one year warranty period.
Or, Apple could actually address the problem. Like in changing brand, or changing whole design.
Most of you miss the obvious. The slot-load drives are crap. Too many mechanics involved in loading the disc, etc. They are prone to failure at some point. Has nothing to do with Snow Leopard or Rosetta (SL has native Intel drivers). It was just a coincidence that people discovered their drives didn't work when they tried to install a new OS, because the article mentioned that most don't use the drive that often. Has nothing to do with the SL DVD.
I use an external FireWire Pioneer SuperDrive because the full size drives are faster, quieter, and rock solid. No cheap mechanisms to fail when loading a disc. There were rarely any drive failures when Apple used the 5.25 size drives. Even my AppleCD300i still works in my vintage LC 575.
Even this thread has an ad for Mac SuperDrives starting at $37.99. What do you expect for a $37 drive? The other issue with burning is finding DVD media that can burn well, especially dual-layer. Memorex DVD DL+R are ones to avoid. I get so many failures with that media.
Exactly my point. I think Apple is sacrificing too much for good looks.
I know slot loading looks cool, but compared to being able to easily eject jammed disk, clean lens and even replace whole unit in a few seconds if faulty... for me, that beats the crap of "looking cool".
That is a great reference! Thanks for the info! Looks like Verbatim is top-notch as well, especially for Dual Layer media!
"Verbatim DVD-R and Verbatim DVD+R DL are our top suggestions for the ultimate in disc quality, as Mitsubishi-made media have been a consistent high-quality performer since 2001. Taiyo Yuden media is an excellent second choice."
I believe Verbatim is doing a lot of re-branding, using others' media - mostly Ritek and Mitsubishi, to my knowledge.
That being said I had - and still have - a good go with Verbatim and "native" Ritek, but TDK and Sony as well, who ever is doing their media.
I've had no issues with with either the drive on my old 17-inch iMac from '06 (still in use), or my 2008 MBP.
In any case, I can't wait until Apple decides to just yank out these optical drives a la Macbook Air, and just make them available as a separate add-on. But optical media is still something enough people want, so it'll be a while . . .
I'm slowly coming around to this reasoning. I just got an 8GB flash drive for $19 at Best Buy. I wasn't shopping for one, but when I saw it I couldn't believe I didn't have one. My 2008 MBP drive died, I posted about that when thread was running here last month(?) or so. It had nothing to do with Snow Leopard installs tho.
For "needing" a replacement, I really maybe have used the drive twice since then, and once was to install SL. So if they did away with it the only thing I'd really need it for is software installs. I guess I could just take an image of the disk on my Mini and install over the network, too. But an external option would be just fine in those cases.
Also, my Battery on this MacBook Pro has failed 3 times in 2 years. Anyone else having that problem?
2007 MacBook Pro 2.2ghz Core 2 Duo