best external DVD for older mac and OS?

[DJW]

I am looking for an apple approved external DVD_RW burner on ebay USB
and hopefully also firewire. Is there a list of model numbers that
will work with an older G3 blue and white tower and OS 10.3.9?

[David Empson]

DJW <dd...@hotmail.com> wrote:

For a B&W G3, you can't use the built-in USB for a DVD writer. It is too
slow. You would need to install a USB 2.0 PCI card.

The built-in Firewire would be fine. You could also replace the internal
optical drive with a DVD writer, but the ATA bus speed would be a
limiting factor with a modern DVD writer.

You may find that you are limited by Mac OS X 10.3.9. The set of
officially supported drives grew significantly with 10.4, but the system
does work with a wider range of "unsupported" drives.

That computer is perfectly capable of running Mac OS X 10.4, given
enough memory and disk space, so upgrading to 10.4 might be an option
worth considering.

I'd expect most older model Pioneer mechanisms to work with 10.3.9, as
Apple was using Pioneer DVD writers in PowerMac G4s for many years.
Something old and slow like a DVR-104 would be fine, but if you went as
far as a DVR-112 you may find it requires 10.4 to be officially
supported, and the B&W G3's I/O bandwidth may not be sufficient to run
it at maximum speed.

--
David Empson
dem...@actrix.gen.nz

[Greg Buchner]

In article <1ja5d4r.po3xcc1xj9akeN%dem...@actrix.gen.nz>,
dem...@actrix.gen.nz (David Empson) wrote:

http://www.patchburn.de/

The FAQ says it should be able to create a profile for most drives. I
have a Pioneer DVR-109 and a DVR-111 that both work fine under 10.4.11
as supported burners and I had both drives when I was still running 10.3
on that particular G4.

Greg B.

--
Actual e-mail address is gregbuchner and I'm located at gmail.com

[Michael L Kankiewicz]

I could be wrong, but I believe you can't boot from an external usb dvd
drive. Needs to be fw. Just something to keep in mind.

MK