News, info, and opinion by Mac users, for Mac users.

October 16, 2006

geekery

A burning obsession

Posted Oct. 16, ’06, 7:38 AM PT by Derik DeLong
Category | Geekery

If you payed attention to my Mac Pro purchase experience, you’ll remember that I slapped a 52x42x52x CD-RW into its second slot. In this world of DVD burning, it seemed silly, but the truth is I really like having a fast CD burner and Apple’s 24x burning in its “Superdrive” is pathetic.

The sad thing is that the Sony drive that’s shipped in some Mac Pros (mine included), the drive can actually be flashed with firmware that will boost the CD write speed to 48x. It also adds DVD-RAM burning. What’s up with that? Basically, Apple is hobbling some of the drives because the others can’t match up.

As tempting as that is, it makes the drive “Unsupported” in System Profiler. I get a warm fuzzy when I see “Apple Installed/Supported”. At this point, it’s nearly completely psychological. At the same time, I realized that having two DVD burners would have been helpful when I was refreshing my DVD backups. I wanted a second drive.

Samsung SH-S182M The thing was that if I wanted to buy a drive that was specifically supported by Mac OS X, I’d be getting one of those underperforming drives. If I’m to replace that CD-RW I’m so fond of, I want the CD burning to be comparable. I eventually settled on the Samsung SH-S182M which I got for a cool $30.99 with free shipping. The specs on it are impressive (18X DVD+R 8X DVD+RW 8X DVD+R DL 18X DVD-R 6X DVD-RW 12X DVD-RAM 16X DVD-ROM 48X CD-R 32X CD-RW 48X CD-ROM 2M Cache IDE DVD Burner With 12X DVD-RAM Write, LightScribe Technology). And it has Lightscribe. That’s just geeky cool.

I had no idea if it would work. It wasn’t even in xlr8yourmac.com’s drive compatibility database. I took a risk. It paid off. The drive completely works. I even bought a copy of DiscLabel to use the Lightscribe feature of the drive. It’s a little slow, but it works pretty well (though I’d recommend always using the high quality setting).

Now for the caveats. First, you need to take the faceplate off. This is a standard issue when implanting these drives in Power Macs since the MDD days. This means you have to power it up somehow to open it so you can pull the faceplate off. Second, in order to upgrade the firmware, you need to use Windows. If you decide to do it, you’re rewarded with some prime Engrish. Finally, I don’t know if there are any distinctions that are made with third-party drives in Tiger and iLife ‘06 (your mileage may vary).


2 Comments

BaldaSarini said:

Thanksgivingday 2006 will be cellebrated in the United States of America on the fourth Thursday month of november. The date is 23th November, 2006.
In Canada,Thanksgiving 2006 will be celebrated on 2-nd Monday in October that is Oct 9th. Bookmark that link I 've found thanksgiving card



October 27, 2006 4:05 PM
DW said:

I also took the plunge without xlr8yourmac confirmation--on a Powermac G4 dual 1.25GHz MDD, the Samsung SH-S182M has worked perfectly, including with the iLife '06 apps such as iDVD!

December 9, 2006 10:44 PM

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