The 18x Sony DRX830U drive reviewed here was replaced
by the 20x DRX840U, which was available from Amazon.com
for about $80. It has since been disscontinued and replaced by the
slower, slimmer SonyDRX-S77U, which is currently (mid 2010) avaliable
from Amazon.com for about $60 in either black
or white.
It should work with USB Macs every bit as well as the older drives,
albeit more slowly.
My previous article was about how to rip
your DVDs to your computer. This time around, we'll be looking at the
Sony DRX830U DVD burner. Whether you need a burner for data backup of all
those MPEG-4 files you just made or to burn custom DVDs, this Sony
burner may just be what you're looking for.
These days, just about every computer comes with a DVD writer or a
DVD/CD-RW combo drive. My iMac G5 came
with a 4x Apple branded SuperDrive, which has worked for the past two
years but is really quite picky about media. When I was lucky, it would
burn at the full 4x speed, but most of the time, it burned at 2x - or
even 1x.
I'd thought about getting a fast external DVD burner, both to get a
nice speed boost and also to be able to use it with whatever computer I
needed to connect it to.
As Mac users, we're fortunate to have an excellent operating system,
great free software, and some pretty long lasting computers. But make a
trip down to your local Staples or
Office Max, and you're instantly reminded that we live in a Windows
world.
Just head over to the internal/external drive aisle and count the
Mac compatible items:
- Hard drives? Good
- External hard drives? Good
- Internal DVD writers? Not bad
- External DVD burners? Terrible
Or is it?
I spent months trying to decide on an external burner. Each one in
the local stores read "Windows only". I looked online, and the Mac
compatible burners were always sold at an average of $60 more than the
Windows version!
It's just not fair. We Mac users should be treated equally with our
different OS brethren. General software, that I can understand. But
can't a company write a simple OS X driver for a burner without
inflating the price?
Well, I was fed up. I had chosen the Sony DVD DRX830U 18x burner
because it was fast and cheap - and the reviewers on Amazon gave it
good marks. As I was scrolling through the comments, I started to
notice that a lot were from Mac users - and how this particular burner
worked fine with Macs.
I set off to the store, determined to take my chances. I'd plug it
in, and if it didn't work, oh well. There's always eBay.
The box was clearly labeled with Windows; no Macintosh compatibility
was stated whatsoever, not even in the documentation. I unwrapped it
all, plugged the cable into the USB 2.0 port on my PowerBook, and
turned it on.
No response at first from OS X, but when I opened the drive and put
a blank DVD in, it showed up! No strange patches to install, no third
party software needed. It worked just the way we Mac users would expect
it to. (Note: This was under Tiger. I have yet to try this using
Panther.)
I'm a big fan of Toast, and the latest
version works great with this external burner. I've experienced write
speeds much lower than the box stated, though. So far the top speed
(with any media) is 8x for DVDs, which is still pretty decent.
The burner worked great with both my iMac and my PowerBook. So far
the device has only given me one or two coasters, which were likely
caused by software and not the drive.
I feel like I've added some incredible functionality to my
three-year-old iMac, and that's what Low End Mac is all about, right?
Brian Gray is a journalist from North Carolina who enjoys writing, the beach, and tinkering with Macs.
