A Double Dose of Optical Drives

trtamtrtam
Posted:
in Current Mac Hardware edited January 2014
"Every Mac Pro comes with a single 16x SuperDrive, but a second bay lets you outfit your Mac Pro with a pair of SuperDrives. Talk about productivity gains, with two 16X SuperDrives, you can simultaneously read from one drive and write to the other. Read from both drives. Or even write to both." (From http://www.apple.com/macpro/design.html)



Has anybody tested this yet? Meaning, is it possible to import music into iTunes from both drives at the same time? Or is it possible to burn the same (or different) iDVD or DVD Studio Pro projects at the same time? Etc. Basically, what IS possible?

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 7
    placeboplacebo Posts: 5,767member
    To the best of my knowledge, you can do anything with two blank CD's that you can do with one, simultaneously. iDVD might not work just because it's designed as a single-window application, but iTunes and definitely the Finder should work.
  • Reply 2 of 7
    dave k.dave k. Posts: 1,306member
    I have two optical drives. You can't import two CDs at once through iTunes. It imports one then the other (queues up the next one).



    Dragon Burn is suppose to burn CDs/DVDs to two different optical drives at the same time. Although, I never got this to work.



    Dave
  • Reply 3 of 7
    guarthoguartho Posts: 1,208member
    Can you burn two discs at once using Disk utility?
  • Reply 4 of 7
    zachpruckowskizachpruckowski Posts: 805member
    I think so, if you open two instances.
  • Reply 5 of 7
    dave k.dave k. Posts: 1,306member
    How do you open two instances?
  • Reply 6 of 7
    zachpruckowskizachpruckowski Posts: 805member
    With a lot of applications, you can make a copy of the application itself. I've seen it done with Toast, and I do it with Text Edit and Adium.
  • Reply 7 of 7
    jeffdmjeffdm Posts: 12,951member
    I used to be one of those clamoring for a second optical drive, but in the past year or two, the amount of optical media handling that I do went down a lot. On my Windows computer, I was ripping enough CDs in succession that I had a second CD read-only drive do the ripping so I wasn't risking my expensive DVD writer. I do DVD backups but very rarely now that I use a Windows program on a different computer that lets me to easily & directly write a decrypted .iso file rather than having messy video_ts directories that Handbrake seemed to prefer despite my efforts otherwise.



    I think the option is probably there to allow media pros to have both an HD-DVD and Blu-Ray drive, or allowing a slightly larger scale disc duplication system without an external box.



    If I get a Mac Pro, I'll probably take advantage of the extra space and drive connector for an ATA drive.
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