I have a first revision MacBook Pro, and for one reason or another, my SuperDrive fails to work anymore. I have an extra DVD burner lying around, an internal drive in an old tower I built years ago, a Lite-On I think. Is there any sort of external enclosure that's recommended to work with a MacBook Pro specifically, or will any of the random enclosures on Newegg or wherever else do? Thanks for your help.
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Enclosure for internal DVD drive for MacBook Pro?
- Thread starter cramer
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So you mean, you don't want to put your MacBook Pro's internal drive in an enclosure, but rather a plain 5.25" desktop drive?
This should generally work fine. This works via an external connection and should conform to certain standards. So there should be no "more less compatible". Still, I wouldn't get a super-cheap one off eBay as compatibility issues with cheap and or quirky chipsets occasionally arise with these bridge chipsets. As far as I know, these are mostly issues between drives and enclosure, not enclosure and certain computers.
But as I said... Generally "anything" should work fine and most probably will. FireWire being somewhat "better", faster and slightly less error/failure-prone. But the price premium isn't probably worth it.
You could also get a internal replacement drive to be installed in your MacBook Pro. I recently got one off eBay for around 80 or 90 US-$ (I'm lazy with currency conversion). It's really not that difficult to do the install yourself, if you take your time and proper caution (and are brave enough to do it)
This should generally work fine. This works via an external connection and should conform to certain standards. So there should be no "more less compatible". Still, I wouldn't get a super-cheap one off eBay as compatibility issues with cheap and or quirky chipsets occasionally arise with these bridge chipsets. As far as I know, these are mostly issues between drives and enclosure, not enclosure and certain computers.
But as I said... Generally "anything" should work fine and most probably will. FireWire being somewhat "better", faster and slightly less error/failure-prone. But the price premium isn't probably worth it.
You could also get a internal replacement drive to be installed in your MacBook Pro. I recently got one off eBay for around 80 or 90 US-$ (I'm lazy with currency conversion). It's really not that difficult to do the install yourself, if you take your time and proper caution (and are brave enough to do it)
If you're going for an internal, just be sure to get one with correct height. As far as I know, the 15" MBP has a 9.5mm height optical drive (which is quite unusal sometimes called "SuperSlim", I believe), while the 17" comes with a standard 12.7mm height notebook drive that should be widely available.
Well... I'm pretty sure on this, having it read or figured out from some sources on the net. But let me say that I haven't checked or installed these drives myself yet (One is being shipped to me at the moment). So you might want to double-check this, depending on your MBP model. Especially if you 17" model which has fewer reports on drive replacements.
As for the actual install, just make sure you follow the instructions (ifixit.com for instance) meticulously and take your time, so that you won't break anything. Then it's really not so difficult.
Well... I'm pretty sure on this, having it read or figured out from some sources on the net. But let me say that I haven't checked or installed these drives myself yet (One is being shipped to me at the moment). So you might want to double-check this, depending on your MBP model. Especially if you 17" model which has fewer reports on drive replacements.
As for the actual install, just make sure you follow the instructions (ifixit.com for instance) meticulously and take your time, so that you won't break anything. Then it's really not so difficult.