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Island Roots
Nov 20, 2003, 12:27 AM
The SuperDrive in my Power Mac G5 has the following specs (gathered from System Profiler):

SONY DVD RW DW-U10A:

Manufacturer: SONY
Model: SONY DVD RW DW-U10A
Revision: A43h
Serial Number: xxxxxxxx
Drive Type: CD-RW/DVD-RW
Disc Burning: Apple Supported/Shipped
Removable Media: Yes
Detachable Drive: No
Protocol: ATAPI
Unit Number: 0
Socket Type: Internal

I know that in Jaguar, Apple disabled the DVD-RW capabilities of the SuperDrives (making it DVD-R). Currently, Apple continues to advertise the SuperDrive as DVD-R only, rather than DVD-RW. Does Panther enable the DVD-RW capabilities of the SuperDrive? If no, will I be able to erase a DVD-RW disc via Toast 6 Titanium using my G5's SuperDrive?

The reason I ask is because I want to start backing up my data (specifically my music) to external sources in case of the inevitable; HDD failure. I want to use the DVD archiving feature in iTunes but I don't want to be waisting DVD discs if the DVD-RW feature of my SuperDrive can't be enabled.



simX
Nov 20, 2003, 03:17 AM
You can natively burn to DVD-RWs even in Jaguar, I think. It just acts like a DVD-R in that you can only burn to it once. (You use Disk Utility to reformat it.)

jrcomer
Dec 30, 2003, 02:46 PM
Justin -

This is precisely what I want to use my G5 Superdrive for. Did you ever get an answer to your question about whether it can be used to backup to rewriteable DVD's?

Thanks,

James