Our eSATA evangelism reaches its end point when it comes to optical drives. (Interface saturation is much more common when testing hard drives over USB 2.0 and FireWire 400 interfaces in particular, hence, why eSATA’s bandwidth makes it such a good choice for external hard drives.) With this range of scores, and never getting to a point where any of the interfaces being tested were completely saturated, we believe our testing methodology for optical drives transcends interfaces and gets right to the meat and potatoes, i.e. Its LG SATA Blu-ray Disc burner scored 29.85x for CD, 8.67x for DVD and 3.59x for BD. Its Lite-On ATAPI DVD burner scored 34.83x for CD and 11.38x for DVD. FireWire 400 offers a very slight advantage over USB 2.0 but the performance is reasonably close.Īs a means of comparison, we also benchmarked the internal optical drives installed in the Polywell system that we reviewed a few issues back. Therefore, the data acquired through this test shows that eSATA adds no benefit for external optical drives. We aren’t certain as to why this is the case, particularly since the CD and DVD scores matched the scores attained through the USB 2.0 and FireWire 400 interfaces. Curiously, while Blu-ray Disc performance was close between USB 2.0 (4.15x) and FireWire 400 (4.42x), eSATA performance for BD was strikingly poor by comparison at only 3.09x. The scores for CD and DVD were roughly the same across all three interfaces we tested (USB 2.0, FireWire 400 and eSATA), yielding average read speeds of 23.7x for CD-R and 8.75x for DVD+R. We created Discovery discs in CD-R, DVD+R and BD-R formats and then speed tested the drive with DVDINFOPro. We performed speed testing with two handy utilities: Lightning UK!’s Imgburn (free, and Nic Wilson’s DVDINFOPro ($30, Imgburn’s Discovery function allows you to fill up a disc to test many characteristics of an optical drive. Oxford’s bridge chips have become a de facto standard for external optical drives, though other bridge chips certainly exist. These are good choices for these particular components, though there are certainly numerous Blu-ray Disc burners on the market that could be integrated into this product. The underlying drive mechanism is Pioneer’s BDR-203, and the unit’s bridge chip is Oxford’s 934DSB. A small muffin fan is built into the case as well, and it spins whenever the drive is powered on.
#External blu ray burner 2009 mac os#
We then moved the FireWire cable to a MacBook with a dying optical drive to do a reinstall of Mac OS X, where it performed not only more reliably, but also much more quickly than the Apple-supplied internal drive. We connected the drive to a workstation via FireWire 400 and seamlessly burned a project from Adobe Encore.
We experienced no trouble at all using the drive for day-to-day operation.