Just installed non-Superdrive in Mac Pro - ripping problems solved!

[ascender]

During the first pass through my DVD collection with Mac The Ripper and Handbrake, I found countless titles that couldn't be ripped for one reason or another. I just put them to one side and carried on with the rest. Having seen advice on here about external burners, I decided to buy a Pioneer drive and just mount it in the second optical bay on my Mac Pro.

The different has been staggering, both in terms of speed of ripping and the way it has sped through the previously problematic discs.

Just wanted to post this in case anyone was considering the same and wanted to know how well it worked.

 

[Sayer]

I had numerous problems with the Pioneer Superdrive in my Mac at work until I found a Pioneer firmware updated for it, found a third-party firmware upload app and burned the drive.

After that it worked perfectly. For some reason Apple turns down the max burn speeds to allegedly keep drive noise down. And Apple also doesn't release firmware updates hardly at all for Superdrives to address problems with the OEM drives that the OEM fixes regularly.

Very frustrating, but that's Apple.

This is where I got the info and Mac app to burn the Pioneer Superdrive with Pioneer OEM firmware. http://www.macos.utah.edu/documentation/hardware/pm_g5_superdrive_fix.html