Adding 2nd DVD Drive to Mac Pro

aubreylaubreyl
Posted:
in Current Mac Hardware edited January 2014
I purchased a Mac Pro but of course only have the standard Superdrive that it comes with. I am selling my Windows machine now that it is being replaced. It has two nice DVD burners in them, both are dual layer and very nice. Am I able to add one of these standard dvd burners to the Mac Pro or do I have to order something that is from Apple?

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 3
    MarvinMarvin Posts: 15,324moderator
    If they are the older IDE (ATA/PATA) you should be able to put one in. I would not recommend buying one from Apple - not sure if they even sell standalone drives. You can pick up DVD burners very cheaply these days and the 3rd party ones tend to have better media support.



    They're not always supported in apps like imovie, itunes etc but you can usually work around that problem easily.



    You can tell what connector the drives use by the width of the cable - IDE is the wide kind, SATA is the small one.







    I don't think an SATA drive will work - people have said you can get it to work as the Mac Pro uses SATA for the hard drives but it's not easy to do. The manual suggests that it's still the older connection they use:



    http://manuals.info.apple.com/en/Mac...lDrive_DIY.pdf



    So if you do buy another optical drive, don't buy an SATA one.
  • Reply 2 of 3
    seek3rseek3r Posts: 179member
    The SATA/PATA comment here may be moot anyway since most older PCs are going to have PATA optical drives, but the MP *does* have 2 SATA ports on the motherboard reserved for ODD use. I have a hard disk sitting in my lower optical bay hooked up tone of them :-p.



    The main problem isn't connections though, it's driver support. Google around and see if the drives you have are supported on OSX.
  • Reply 3 of 3
    onlookeronlooker Posts: 5,252member
    I always buy Pioneer drives and they have always been plug and play for me on the Mac. If they do have drivers on their website, I'm not sure I've ever used them.
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