USB external DVD drive a1379 on PPC?

[ervus]

A friend of mine has one of the newer mac laptops without a DVD drive, so they got one of the separate external USB drives from apple. We were trying to read a DVD and it would not acknowledge the disc. It would not eject it. We tried all the usual methods short of opening the drive to retrieve the disc. So while they went looking for a pry bar I plugged the drive into my powerbook. Of course it also would not load, not eject, etc. But it did show up on the listing of the USB bus in system profiler. So here is the funny part... I started virtual PC, booted windos and was able to eject the disc just fine. I thought that was pretty pathetic mr. jobs. I was reminded of the time I went looking for a chainsaw to retrieve my 3.5" floppy.

Anyway, so here's the question: Has anyone got these drives working with PowerPC? I found this atricle:

Use the Apple external SuperDrive on (almost) any Mac - Mac OS X Hints

So it seems the only reason it doesn't work from the outset is software settings...

 

[Macbookprodude]

The answer is it depends - due to the firmware of the external Apple SuperDrives which originally were for the Mac Mini and the MacBook Air - they will not work at all. Your best to get an off brand external
SuperDrive like LG or Sony - those shoyjd work fine. Make sure you get a USB 2.0 card so it will give you close to 480gb/sec.