Need some advise on purchasing a DVD/CD writer

Hardware
1

One issue with MPU is that I frequently binge listen to a few episodes back to back to back… I have literally pulled off the highway to take notes on what Katie and David were saying. Maybe back in August of 2016, I listened to MPU #126 that featured special guest Shawn Blanc. The eposode centered around creating, using and maitaining a home servers. At the time I was new to the Tech Scene and what I was hearing blew me away.

Me and the family is looking to do a renovation on the house and step one will be cleaning out the basement aka the pit of despair. I have a lot of classic DVDs (Non-Blu Ray), and CDs. I recently purchased the LG Ultra Slim DVD Writer but I’m not too impressed.

Can anyone point me in the right direction?

Thnaks

2

Apple still sells the Super Drive.

3

I’m still running the Apple USB SuperDrive that I got with my original generation MacBook Air.

4

I have been using my wife’s 2010 Mac Book Pro, which had like a dozen ports and an internal CD-R drive. I guess I’m wondering how long it will take to rip a DVD. I assume I want the fastest my local Micro Center said this one would be good but I feel I should ask around

5

I used a 2006 MacBook, running Lion I think, for this, in 2013-2015. It worked fine. Rather than worrying about speed (which I’d guess was about 30% of run time for a typical DVD), I just did the ripping here and there while I was working on other things on other devices. If you don’t think of it as a task that needs to get done urgently, speed and performance don’t really matter much, and you can get by with the tech at your disposal.

2 Likes
6

I’m using an Apple SuperDrive to read and write all my CDs that I use for backups of photos.

7

Keep in mind on some Macs, you may have to go through some pretty fiddly steps in order to make the external Apple SuperDrive work.

http://www.hardturm.ch/luz/2016/07/how-to-make-the-macbook-air-superdrive-work-with-any-mac-el-capitan-onwards/

8

Yes, that’s another reason I think just using the old laptop will be the best option.

9

When I got my first optical drive-less iMac I bought an external tray-loading drive from OWC. Not only do I rip my DVDs/CDs I’ve got a small business selling some software on CDs so I needed to be able to burn disks reliably.
It’s no longer sold but looks like https://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/MR3USD24/ but mine has a plastic housing and the current one has an aluminum housing.

I didn’t like the idea of the superdrive because I didn’t want a bus powered drive and I don’t like slot loading because of the risk of scratching.