Internal DVD Burner Help Needed

[MacKenzie999]

Hi everyone...

Can anyone recommend a good internal dvd burner for a Powermac G4/466/Jaguar?

I'd like it to work with Apple's free dvd software. It kind of kills me to have to buy one of these since my next mac will be a G5, but that is probably 6 months away and I need dvd burning capability for a job now.

Also, are these things hard to install? I'm a graphics guy with minimal hardware skills, I'm guessing I can muddle through it but if there are any considertions I should be aware of they'd be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

 

[Eniregnat]

I would think about an external drive.
Firewire or SCSI/II.
It will easly transfer to you G5, and give you a second burner.
A portable drive will also be cross platform usable, and they are virtualy plug and burn.

QPS and Fantom are companies that I have had good luck with. I have a QPS-Que CD burner that is a well used and trusted tool. I have yet to have ether companies drives fail me.

If you opt for the internal installation. It's easy. 1 ribbon and 1 power, just like a HD. Just search the net. I've burnt through a few Pioneer drives on a PC, but I do a lot of burning and the organization I work for buys bottom of the line internal burners. (They do buy top of the line NAS, and external burners and drives. Go figure.)

 

[ColdZero]

Check out www.xlr8yourmac.com and look under the IDE section. There is a compatibility database where you can look for the experiances that various people have had with different drives. Personally I would recommend the Pioneer A05 or A06. The A06 gives you both DVD- and DVD+ capabilities while the A05 is DVD- only. Both will work with Disk Burning and iTunes and the Apple DVD player.

 

[macphoria]

I also recommend Internal Burner from Pioneer A06 or A06. It will increase the resale value of your computer and also you can use iDVD which costs $50 as opposed to DVD Studio Pro which costs $500. If you do have DVD Studio Pro, then you could get External Burner, but you will need Toast.

Just remember, if you install Internal Burner, you might want to run Software Update (reinstall your OS) so that your OS recognizes your drive and works with it. I installed Internal Burner and at first it did not recognize the drive. But after I ran Software Update, it started to work fine.

 

[Eniregnat]

We all seem to like Pioneer drives.

Look here for the back of the drive. Poor picture, but it should show you how simple it is to hook up. I can't find an installation manual.

(I’d still go for the external drive, mostly because it’s easily transferable and won’t take the place of one of your HDs on your new G5)

 

[ColdZero]

The HD and cdrom in the G5 are seperate. You can have only 1 optical drive and 2 hard drives. They are seperate bays. Only 1 has external access.

 

[Eniregnat]

From the specs I read, if one wanted to add a second burner, one would take up a HD slot, but I read the PDF rather quickly.

Apple.com
Storage
• Two Serial ATA controllers supporting up to 150-MBps data throughput per hard drive
• Two 3.5-inch hard drive expansion bays with drive guides for a second drive
–One 80GB or 160GB 7200-rpm Serial ATA drive installed in standard configurations5
–Support for up to two internal Serial ATA drives; 500GB maximum system capacity5
–8MB memory buffers on all hard drives
• Optical drive bay with SuperDrive (DVD-R/CD-RW) installed; writes DVD-R discs at up
to 4x speed, reads DVDs at up to 8x speed, writes CD-R discs at up to16x speed, writes
CD-RW discs at up to 10x speed, reads CDs at up to 32x speed
PCI expansion
• One of the following configurations:
–Three open full-length 33MHz, 64-bit PCI slots
–One open full-length 133MHz, 64-bit PCI-X slot and two open full-length 100MHz,
64-bit PCI-X slots
Communications
• 10/100/1000BASE-T Ethernet connector (RJ-45)
• Built-in 56K V.92 modem (RJ-11)13
• Expansion slot for optional 54-Mbps AirPort Extreme Card (based on IEEE 802.11g
specification; 802.11b Wi-Fi certified)6
• External AirPort Extreme antenna
• Optional Bluetooth 1.1 module and antenna

It looks like 1 optical bay and 2 HD bays. If you only have one HD, you could put the DVDR there, but where would the door go. One could replace the Combo or Super drive with a DVDR, but that wouldn't make sense. I don't know. I would like to read some feed back as to how one adds drives to the G5. (This beyond answering the core of this thead.

 

[madforrit]

Re: Internal DVD Burner Help Needed

Originally posted by MacKenzie999
Hi everyone...

Can anyone recommend a good internal dvd burner for a Powermac G4/466/Jaguar?

I'd like it to work with Apple's free dvd software. It kind of kills me to have to buy one of these since my next mac will be a G5, but that is probably 6 months away and I need dvd burning capability for a job now.

Also, are these things hard to install? I'm a graphics guy with minimal hardware skills, I'm guessing I can muddle through it but if there are any considertions I should be aware of they'd be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

I just got and installed an internal Pioneer 105 DVD-R. I was in a very similar situation to you (G5 soon, job now) and have a G4/450/Jag. I ordered my drive BARE (new, but no box or blank dvd's or software bundled with it) from Other World Computing (www.macsales.com) for $187 plus $9 for overnight shipping. Just installed it a few hours ago...while the installation is more complicated than adding RAM (which btw, I upped from 256 to 768MB), OWC provides EXCELLENT instructions on their website. I would highly recommend this drive/seller/price for your situation. No drivers to install either...Jag recognizes the drive. I have yet to burn a DVD with iDVD because I have to pick up some blanks from the Apple Store...but it looks like it should work no problem. Hope this helps.

--mad

 

[hugemullens]

www.mcetech.com

They just sell pioneer A05's but they guarentee they will work with iDVD, and on a 800 DP it was literally just pull the old one out and put the new one in.