DVD RW Drive

jhazeljhazel
Posted:
in General Discussion edited January 2014
I know there have been several discussions on this topic but I haven't really seen anything definitive so I wanted to throw it out there again.



I'm running an older Dual G4 that has the factory 2x SuperDrive. I REALLY want to upgrade that drive to something newer since I find myself using iDVD more and more these days. NewEgg has the new NEC 16x Dual Layer drive for a very reasonable price (~$90) so I want to pounce but...



Am I going to have trouble running iLife and burning (music, photos, dvds, ....anything) to this drive? What if I went with the Pioneer (108?) drive even though it is slower? I would settle for 8x if it meant I could run it on the Mac...



Any thoughts? I have read where several folks have said they read it wouldn't work or said they thought it wouldn't work. I'm curious if anyone has actually tried it though. If not, I might go ahead and bite the bullet and throw one in there and test it out...



Thanks,



Josh

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 3
    eugeneeugene Posts: 8,254member
    The Pioneer produces better quality burns than the NEC for now. Pioneer is really on the ball with the firmware updates lately too...
  • Reply 2 of 3
    jhazeljhazel Posts: 28member
    Yes, but my question is will I lose functionality by putting it into my Mac? I REALLY want a newer drive but not if I can't use it in my Mac...



    Thanks,



    Josh
  • Reply 3 of 3
    eugeneeugene Posts: 8,254member
    You can probably use both drives with Patchburn II. The Pioneer for sure works with Apple iApps after installing a generic Patchburn II driver.



    Word of caution though, Burning a 12x and 16x on my DVR-108 in Toast is actually slower than burning at 8x. The only disc I've tried that I can select a "16x" write strategy with are the 8x Apple/Maxell brand (MXL RG03). When burning a full 4.4 GB of data, Toast always fails to verify the disc. Total time to burn is around 12 minutes. Burning at 8x produce much better disc quality and the burns only take 10.5 minutes.



    When I burn discs at 8x on a PC, it usually takes <9 minutes.
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