External vs Internal: Quality, Price, Use - DVD burner

myst

I want to upgrade from the combo drive that let me buy my wondrous G5 so I can have DVD burning. I was wondering if there were any higher speed Internal drives for my G5 or if a external drive is a good bet. Any opinions or past experiences?



(P.S. If Internal I would want to have CD burning too... I assume all do by this point...)



P.P.S- this one any good?



http://eshop.macsales.com/Catalog_It...em=PIODVR108BK

rok

well, the only serious drawback to an external drive is that idvd will not, by default, use them to burn dvd's. otherwise, the system will see and use it fine, so long as it is a supported model. you can't really go wrong with pioneer drives, EXCEPT they don't offer mac-compatible firmware updaters for their drives. i found an updater through xlr8yourmac.com and now have an 8x dvd burner, in my own 3rd party firewire case. works great so far.



oh, and the eject menu extra that you can enable in mac os x to eject optical media only works with internal drives... external ones still require manual dragging to the trash or command-e.



personally, i love external drives, simply because i find i need it sometimes at work, sometimes for my wife's computer, and most often my own personal computer. i wish it was bus-powered, but i guess that's wishful thinking.



also, look around on newsgroups... apparently there are two files you can add to your system to allow idvd to burn to external dvd burners. i cannot recall their names, though.