Suggestions For External Dvd-r Drive For Mac
Apple's digital-hub strategy has made the DVD burner - with its ability to play movies, back up more than 4.5GB of data, and create movies that your friends can play on their home DVD players - a highly sought-after system component. But if you don't have the money to upgrade to a new Mac with a built-in SuperDrive, or don't have the option (or inclination) to install one, you can still join the digital revolution by purchasing an external DVD-R drive.
The same Pioneer SuperDrive included in the newest desktop Macs is now available as an external FireWire drive from a variety of companies. And thanks to a hardware upgrade, this new crop of drives can burn a DVD twice as fast as the previous models could. The bad news is that you'll miss out on some basic functionality: external DVD-R drives can't play commercial DVDs unless your Mac already has a DVD drive built in, and you won't be able to use iDVD, Apple's free DVD-authoring software, at all (although some external drives do come with iDVD alternatives). But if you're willing to live with these compromises, an external DVD-R drive offers an excellent - and fairly inexpensive - way to add DVD-burning capabilities to your Mac.
- 7 products - LG Electronics Slim Portable 8x USB 2.0 External DVD+/-RW Drive - Black Compact and convenient. Connects to your MacBook Pro, MacBook Air,.
- Details: External drive; plays and burns DVD, CD Much like the Patuoxun above, LG's GP57EW40 is an inexpensive, lightweight unit that can be picked up for a good deal less than Apple's SuperDrive.
Macworld Lab rounded up seven of the newest external FireWire DVD burners: Cyclone's DVD Revo FireWire SuperDrive 4x, EZQuest's Boa FireWire DVD-RW, Formac's Devideon, GVP's DVD-R/RW 4x FireWire Drive, Ikebana's 4x FireWire DVD-R/RW Drive, LaCie's d2 FireWire DVD-Rewritable Drive, and Other World Computing's (OWC) Mercury DVR-105. We found that while they all performed almost identically, only two drives, the $379 LaCie and the $399 Formac, included Mac-compatible DVD-authoring software in the box. Of those two, the LaCie drive's great case design and included media edged it into the lead. At First Glance In an attempt to disguise the plain, beige appearance of the Pioneer mechanism, two of the drives, the Formac and the EZQuest, opted for bulky, completely enclosed, silver case designs. The cases hide the device's true color, as well as the headphone jack and the drive activity lights. The GVP's white case with silver details also features an outer door.
I'm having problems with my Mac Mini's internal DVD drive. I have a late 2009 Mac Mini running OS 10.6.8 and the DVD drive isn't reading some discs.
But since there are no buttons on the front, you must flip down the door to access the eject button. Despite their less hip appearance, we prefer the open-face design of the remaining four drives. The best case design belongs to the LaCie drive, which not only was the slimmest of the lot, but also was easily stackable. Speed Burners All the DVD-R drives we tested feature the new Pioneer A05 mechanism. This model doubles each of the speed ratings for the A04 mechanism used in the most current preinstalled desktop SuperDrives at the time of testing.
(Apple should be including the faster A05 mechanism in its desktop systems by the time you read this.) That means the A05 can burn a DVD at 4x, a DVD-RW at 2x, a CD-R at 16x, and a CD-RW at 8x and can read data from a CD at 32x. Of course, to burn DVDs at these faster speeds, you need properly rated media. At the time of this testing, 4x DVD-R media was scarce and fairly expensive (averaging about $4 a pop); however, supply should soon catch up with demand.
But before you go out and buy 4x media for all your DVD-R drives, you should note that using this 4x media can be problematic - if not downright destructive - on older DVD-R drives. A03 and A04 models require a firmware update before they can properly recognize the newer media (see Apple's Web site at www.apple.com for more information). Even after the update, these drives will burn DVDs at only 1x speed on 4x media. Burning to DVD To see how the drives compared with each other, we connected each to a dual-1GHz Power Mac G4 (DDR) running OS X 10.2.3 with 512MB of RAM and recorded how long it took the drives to complete common tasks. We also compared the results with those of the G4's internal Pioneer A04 SuperDrive, the most current model available at the time of testing.
As you might expect from seven nearly identical drives, the performance times were extremely close. When burning a DVD from a 4.2GB disk image using Apple's Disk Copy, times ranged from 26 minutes and 55 seconds for the OWC drive to 28 minutes and 39 seconds for the EZQuest drive.
The Mac's internal drive completed the task in 54 minutes and 10 seconds. Although none of the drives work with Apple's free iDVD software, each drive is compatible with Apple's $999 DVD Studio Pro 1.5.2. We tested how long it took to burn a movie from DVD Studio Pro by performing a Build And Format of the program's tutorial files. Each drive completed the task in less than 5 minutes, with the LaCie finishing first at 4 minutes and 37 seconds. By comparison, the internal drive took nearly 11 minutes.
All of the DVD-R and DVD-RW discs created by the external drives mounted and played in the home DVD players of several Macworld staff members. Burning to CD Although the DVD-burning speeds for the A05 drives are much improved over those of the previous models, the CD-burning times still have a ways to go to catch up to the powerful 52x CD-R drives now on the market. When burning a 560MB iTunes playlist to CD-R media, the external burners - all rated as 16x CD-Rs - finished the task in a virtual dead heat.
The LaCie finished first, clocking in at 4 minutes and 18 seconds, while the Ikebana pulled up the rear only 7 seconds later. The 8x-rated internal drive finished the burn in just over 8 minutes. Still, none came close to matching the 44x-rated Yamaha CRW-F1 drive, which finished the iTunes burn in just over 3 minutes. False Starts As we tested, we ran into a couple of problems with bad drives. Our original OWC drive had trouble recognizing blank DVD media.
The GVP drive also gave us some trouble; our Mac occasionally failed to recognize the drive. In this case, turning the drive on and off a few times fixed the problem. When we reported the trouble, both companies sent replacement drives that worked without these problems. Bundles of Joy What really sets these drives apart from one another is what software and types of media the companies decide to include in the box. This can make the difference between putting your burner to use immediately and having to make another run to the store for extra equipment. Only two of the drives, the Formac and the LaCie, include Mac-compatible software for authoring DVDs.
This is significant for anyone who wants to create video DVDs without shelling out $999 for DVD Studio Pro. In addition to the DVD-authoring software, LaCie also throws in one piece each of DVD-R and CD-R media. Formac, on the other hand, leaves it to you to supply the media. Although they don't ship with authoring software, the Cyclone, EZQuest, Ikebana, and OWC drives do all include software for burning data DVDs and CDs. The Cyclone and Ikebana drives come with Roxio's Toast Lite software. While this version of Toast lets you complete some simple burning tasks, for more-advanced features, such as burning VideoCDs, you'll need to spend $79 to upgrade to Toast Titanium.
The Ikebana also includes two pieces of blank DVD-R and one piece of DVD-RW media, as well as a handy faux-leather carrying case for easy portability. The Cyclone drive includes one piece each of DVD-R and CD-R media. Both the EZQuest and the OWC drives come with the full version of Charismac's Discribe software (mmmh; Reviews, May 2002). EZQuest throws in a single piece of DVD-R media, while OWC includes by far the biggest goody bag of blank media - 5 blank DVD-Rs and a whopping 25 blank CD-Rs. Taking a minimalist approach, GVP bundles no software or blank media with its drive, although the company told us it plans to begin tossing a blank DVD-R disc into the box in the near future. Macworld's Buying Advice To take full advantage of a DVD-R drive, your best bet is to install it internally into your system.
If you don't have that option, any of these external drives would be a great addition. Just plug them into your FireWire port and you're ready to go.
Both the Formac Devideon and the LaCie d2 include Mac-compatible DVD-authoring software, giving them a clear advantage over the rest. In addition, the LaCie drive comes with spare media and features a more practical case design. You can check current prices on the following drives by clicking on the titles.
I feel old saying this, but having used computers since before external hard drives existed, I can say with certainty that buying a hard drive is easier today than it’s ever been before. For traditional drives, prices are low, options are numerous, and capacities are so high that your only choices are “enough space,” “more than enough space,” and “way more than enough space.” I could point you towards a and end this article without another paragraph. Since Apple doesn’t even sell a Mac with that much disk space, you could back up five (or more) computers to that drive without running out of room. Or you could store a decade worth of digital photos alongside a giant media library. But buying an external hard drive isn’t necessarily that simple. There are a bunch of factors worth considering before making a purchase, including everything from reliability to portability, design, capacity, speed, and connectivity. Some hard drives are really cheap but have a higher chance of failing after a year or two of heavy use. So in this How-To, I’m going to discuss the big issues you need to consider, and guide you towards the best external hard drive for your needs Quick Overview Most hard drives are guaranteed to work for one to two years no matter what you do with them, ranging from occasional backups to continuous video streaming.
They’ll generally last much longer if you don’t use them every day. However — and this is really important — if you keep a typical drive mechanism running 24 hours each day for two years, it’s going to burn out. Hard drive longevity used to be measured with an estimate of “Mean Time Before Failure” (MTBF). Each year has 61,320 hours, so a drive with a MTBF of 300,000 hours would promise to last 4.9 years if actively used 24 hours each day. Desktop drives typically promised higher MTBFs than laptop drives, but there were exceptions.
Unfortunately, MTBF numbers were only predictions — and often inaccurately high. Consumers complained. So drive makers switched to a different but even less useful metric: Annualized Failure Rate (AFR), which estimates the percentage of total drives made that will fail in a year due to manufacturing defects. All an AFR of “0.73%” suggests is that 7,300 of 1,000,000 drives will likely develop problems in year one due to defects rather than abuse. That low percentage may seem reassuring, but it obscures the reality that heavy drive use increases failures over time, and some drives are much better-suited to heavy use than others. My advice: purchase your drive with a specific purpose in mind.
If you’re backing up precious photos, home videos, or important files, buy a name brand, desktop-sized hard drive from a company with a track record of reliability, and pay a little more for it. It doesn’t really matter how the drive looks, just that it will work for a long time. But if you’re just using a drive to store apps, games, or iTunes movies that you can easily re-download at any time, or only intermittently turn a drive on for backups, you can feel comfortable going with something cheaper, more portable, or fancier-looking. Capacity + Pricing It’s easy to pick the right hard drive capacity these days: most external drives now offer at least as much space as a standard Mac (1TB) — and there are — and you can get an.
Most people will find that that 4TB is more than enough to hold years of accumulated photos, media files, and data, but there’s no wrong answer to the capacity question: it’s mostly a matter of personal preference right now. That said, there are sweet spots. Expect to pay around,. By “basic,” I mean the popular and consumer-grade desktop drives shown above from Seagate, a major (but not top) drive manufacturer with a good (but not great) warranty. The are similar up until the 4TB mark, where the price doubles. Generally, 3TB to 5TB would be the sweet spots between capacity and pricing, but of the 3TB Expansion mirror comments I’ve seen elsewhere online: Seagate’s 3TB units had lots of problems.
You’re better off considering 2TB, 4TB or 5TB units instead. Don’t be surprised that longer-lasting drives can cost twice as much as basic models.
They’ll typically last longer, which is worth something. Similarly, don’t be surprised if a solid state drive (SSD) costs much more and offers lower capacity than a mechanical drive. SSDs are just beginning to become mainstream internal drives for computers, and their capacities aren’t yet at the “more than enough space” point. Reliability Since MTBF and AFR are such sketchy measures of hard drive reliability, I suggest that you focus on two more tangible factors: the reputation of the manufacturer, and the length of the drive’s warranty. A three-year warranty is the best you can expect from a consumer-grade external drive from a top vendor, regardless of whether it’s a.
(Only the very best internal SSDs now offer and, though notably with much less storage space than the drives covered in this article. See my How-To guides to, and.) If reliability is your major concern, as it generally is mine, I’d suggest you look most seriously at (featuring ultra-reliable Hitachi hard drive mechanisms) and, all of which have three-year warranties. I G-Tech’s excellent for 9to5Mac, and have trusted their earlier drives for many years without any issues. Was covered in my, and while it’s more expensive and lower-capacity than the G-Drive USB, it has no moving parts to worry about. Go with a G-Drive if you need a large reliable drive, or T1 if you want something small and reliable.
Suggestions For External Dvd-r Drive For Mac Download
Portability + Design There are five major types of external hard drives:,. The first two use 3.5″ hard drive mechanisms and are effectively non-portable: they sit on your desk, depend on wall power, and aren’t easy to carry in typical bags. Flash drives are keychain-sized but relatively limited in capacity and crazy expensive when they begin to approach laptop drive capacities. So if you need a portable hard drive with respectable storage capacity at a reasonable price, you’ll most likely pick a laptop-class drive with a 2.5″ hard drive mechanism inside. Owned by Seagate, boutique drive maker LaCie’s lineup nicely illustrates the relative size differences between the categories of external drives, though there are even smaller laptop and slim laptop drives out there now.
In January, I both, the world’s thinnest external mechanical hard drive, and, a boxy mirrored drive with twice the capacity. Both use USB 3.0 for data and power, with no need for an external power supply. Either one can easily fit into a laptop bag, backpack, or purse, but Seven is much, much smaller. If you want a portable, reliable hard drive at a low price with minimal design frills, consider, which have a. But if you’re looking for something with a distinctive design — and willing to compromise a little on long-term reliability — are definitely the best around. Pick the one that appeals to your personal taste. Speed, Connectivity, iOS Compatibility, and Apple’s AirPort Time Capsules A lot could be said about each of these topics, but I’ll save you some time and cut to the chase: recent developments mean that most people will be best off with USB 3.0 wired drives, except under one of three circumstances: you need incredible speed for Mac video editing, you want to stream video to your iOS devices, or you want to do automated wireless backups.
If you’re planning on doing 4K or other disk-intensive Mac video editing, Thunderbolt hard drives such as or can deliver dramatically better speeds than drives that share your Mac’s USB bus. They’re much more expensive than comparably capacious USB drives, but they’re built for professional use, and priced accordingly. That said, USB 3.0 drives tend to outperform prior-generation FireWire 800 drives, which were adequate for pre-4K editing, so most users will have no need to look for faster options. If you’re concerned about real-world speeds for a USB drive, check the manufacturer’s stated “up to XXXMB/second transfer rates” claims and subtract around 10-20% for real world performance.
If you want to use your hard drive to store content that can also be streamed to your iOS device, consider or, which offer integrated Wi-Fi streaming, a built-in battery for completely wireless operation, and USB connectivity for synchronization. I’ve tested both, and while Seagate’s version has the edge on pricing, speed, and battery performance, My Passport Wireless has an SD slot built in to back up your digital photos on the road.
IOS users will have a better experience with the Wireless Plus, while Mac users and digital photographers with infrequent iOS needs may prefer My Passport Wireless. Go with the one that best suits your needs. Last but not least, if you want to do automated wireless backups, consider — but think carefully about — an. I currently use the latest version of Time Capsule, which has been completely redesigned and has fast 802.11ac wireless with your choice of a or hard drive. On a positive note, it works completely as expected, and although the initial Time Machine backup process for a large Mac hard drive is incredibly slow, incremental backups later on are fine.
My concerns are mostly in reliability and pricing. I’ve had two prior-generation Time Capsules experience hard drive issues, and though Apple may have fixed those problems with the new model, it’s very easy to go out and buy a standalone drive for much less. I’m not a big fan of wireless drives right now, but continue to hope that wireless technology will catch up with the demands of current machines. All of my important files are on a wired, and they will probably stay there for the foreseeable future. Author, lawyer, and award-winning restaurateur Jeremy Horwitz started his journalism career in the early 1990’s, covering video games as a freelancer for numerous publications before creating and running Ziff Davis’s Intelligent Gamer magazine. A graduate of Cornell Law School, he previously ran editorial for the Apple-centric site iLounge and created the historic iLounge Pavilion at CES before joining 9to5Mac and 9to5Toys as a Senior Editor. A lifelong consumer electronics expert and gourmet, he now focuses on the changing ways people work, play, eat, and travel.
His Spanish restaurant Aro Bar de Tapas won Best New Restaurant (Opened 2015-2016), Best Charcuterie, Best Craft Cocktails, and Best Desserts awards.