Thinking about getting Mac mini, wondering about external hd and dvd-r support

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preslove

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High, I'm thinking about getting a Mac mini, but don't have alot of scratch to throw at it. A couple of enclosures and a cheap hard drive and dvd-r would be cheaper than getting the super drive and hard drive upgrades. I had a few questions about the possible set up:

1). Does apple software support third party dvd-r's? If not, is there software for the mac that would run support an external?

2). If an external works, would there be a performance hit burning a cd/dvd from the combo to the external dvdr?

3). Say, I had the hard drive hooked up to the firewire port, and the dvdr to the usb2, would burning from the hard drive to the dvd be slower?

Thanks
 
1) does the DRIVE?! my superdrive is uber sensitive on cd-rs and dvd-rs... i would wager no.

2) toast has no problems with external firewire or usb2.0 drives... as alll modern drives have buffer underrun protection and firewire transfers pretty darned fast you should be alright.

3) dunno... i recently transfered 40gb from a usb2.0 drive to the firewire drive on my powerbook in about 50 minutes.

-esr
 
Apple's superdrives are no different than any of the drive you can buy as parts. My G5 has a Pioneer optical drive in it. If the drive is picky, thats pioneer's problem, not apple.
 
or apple as the mitsu whatevers are finicky as all f*ck. i too have had zero problems with my pionners, lite-ons and plextors, just this damn mitsu whatever in the powerbook... which... last i checked... apple speced to their third party assembler in taiwan to include in the powerbook... or so my apple rep seems to think :D

-esr
 
Thanks for your replies :)

I guess I wan't really clear. I would put a hard drive and dvd-rw drive into enclosures, and hook them up by usb2 (maybe one of them firewire). My first question is will the dvdr drive be supported by apple's included software? If not, is there good dvd burning software available for the mac?
 
preslove said:
Thanks for your replies :)

I guess I wan't really clear. I would put a hard drive and dvd-rw drive into enclosures, and hook them up by usb2 (maybe one of them firewire). My first question is will the dvdr drive be supported by apple's included software? If not, is there good dvd burning software available for the mac?
Click to expand...


It depends on the Drive you get (optical)
There are some patches out that make iTunes burning, Finder Burning supported with 3rd party devices.
Check out www.xlr8yourmac.com , they have a database of drives that work by default or with patches.

Good DVD Burning software would be Toast.
 
there are also patches that are supposed to allow you to use iDVD to burn DVDs to external and third party devices (and also directly to .dmg files). i tried this but didnt get it to work, so id say ymmv and you need to check compatability for the patch/drive.

you shouldnt have any performance hits burning from the internal to the external. firewire runs a 400 Mbps and USB2 is 480 Mbps, so really that is gonna be quick enough. i have burned from HDD to external dvd over firewire no problem.

as mentioned, toast is good software for burning

and for the last, i think youd be alright, but if you have problems, copy to the HDD and then burn. if you are reading the info and out puttting at 480Mbps and then writing at 400 really you shouldnt have a problem, you will always have a good flow of data. id say the biggest problem with this youd have is if you had a crappy HDD in the external. another thing that will effect this is the number of processes you are running at the time of the burning. the fewer the better.
 
something you will have to remember about the USB though is if you have a USB 1.1 device on a 2.0 bus guess what the bus will be running at? you got it 1.1 so that is NOT a recomended idea as I think both ports will be running off the same bus (I might be wrong bout that though) but if they are on the same bus you would be screwed..spend the $100 on the superdrive upgrade and be done with it (as it does DVD-+ R and -+ RW)...if you want more storage then get an external HD and use the enclosure
 
All I really want to know is when will apple start putting in DL DVD drives.

Authoring a 9Gb DVD then having to transfer it to my PC is a pain in the arse
 
gigglebyte said:
something you will have to remember about the USB though is if you have a USB 1.1 device on a 2.0 bus guess what the bus will be running at? you got it 1.1 so that is NOT a recomended idea as I think both ports will be running off the same bus (I might be wrong bout that though) but if they are on the same bus you would be screwed..spend the $100 on the superdrive upgrade and be done with it (as it does DVD-+ R and -+ RW)...if you want more storage then get an external HD and use the enclosure
Click to expand...

Wait, so you're saying that if a USB 1.1 device is hooked up to the mini, the other usb device hooked up will be slowed down to USB 1.1, too? That doesn't make any sense. Aren't all keyboards and mice usb 1.1? That means the firewire is the only fast port :confused:
 
They may eventually use better drives, not sure when though. I mean 16x is out but they still only have 8x superdrives? To there credit, i have yet to find any media faster than 8x in san antonio, tx. BTW we are getting an Apple store, woo hoo!

LKS
 
preslove said:
Wait, so you're saying that if a USB 1.1 device is hooked up to the mini, the other usb device hooked up will be slowed down to USB 1.1, too? That doesn't make any sense. Aren't all keyboards and mice usb 1.1? That means the firewire is the only fast port :confused:
Click to expand...

since I haven't seen the schematic layout for the USB bus I don't know if there is one or two...if they are seperate busses (and they probably are) then there shouldn't be much of an issue BUT if you put a USB 1.1 on a 2.0 bus it will run at 1.1 speeds...period...end of story
 
gigglebyte said:
since I haven't seen the schematic layout for the USB bus I don't know if there is one or two...if they are seperate busses (and they probably are) then there shouldn't be much of an issue BUT if you put a USB 1.1 on a 2.0 bus it will run at 1.1 speeds...period...end of story
Click to expand...

Ok, so if they are on different busses, I could put USB 2 devices on a hub and put my logitech mx700 set on the other, and things would be cool?
 
Apple's iApps, as well as burning from the finder will only work with an internal drive, Apple and many third party drives (but with no Dual Layer support). Their Pro apps like DVD Studio Pro work with most any external burner. There is a patch available for getting an external Firewire drive to run called patchburn (http://www.patchburn.de/index.html) that will allow you to use iDVD. The nice thing about the external is that you can do 16X with all forms of media, where the Powerbook, iBook and iMac all burn at 4X DVD-R, and the G5's and Mac Mini burn at 8x DVD-R.
 
olaf2821 said:
Apple's iApps, as well as burning from the finder will only work with an internal drive, Apple and many third party drives (but with no Dual Layer support). Their Pro apps like DVD Studio Pro work with most any external burner. There is a patch available for getting an external Firewire drive to run called patchburn (http://www.patchburn.de/index.html) that will allow you to use iDVD. The nice thing about the external is that you can do 16X with all forms of media, where the Powerbook, iBook and iMac all burn at 4X DVD-R, and the G5's and Mac Mini burn at 8x DVD-R.
Click to expand...

No Dual Layer at all? I guess I have to keep my pc, then :(.
 
lol.

I dunno why but the dl argument seems pretty trite to me... we're talking a $479 machine here, dell's $500 comp only comes with a 48x cd rom (as of the add i saw in the paper yesterday) wtf?! at least the mini has a combo drive stock... anywho... how many people really need to burn dl in a $500 pc? I guess i'm in the minority. When ever i go to buy a fifty pack of dvd-r's i just end up coming home with another hard drive... i'd rather pay $100 for 160+gb of storage then $30 for lots of little dvds :D... besides... if im moving files around there's this crazy firewire mp3 player thing with 40+gb of storage :D.

-esr
 
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