Can anyone recommend an internal Blu-ray burner?

[monkeybagel]

STOP - The people replying here saying ANY drive with a SATA or IDE interface will be fine are wrong. Some drives do not support sleep in OS X, research the issue and you'll see it is a known problem. If a drive has sleep issues it does not 'wake' with the machine making the whole power saving option 'Put drives to sleep when possible' non-functional. A drive with this issue will not appear is OS X if the system sleeps the drives after non-usage, it crashes disk utility and system information if you try these after sleep.

Now this thread has already had advice of ANY drive working fine - that's wrong. Someone mentioned Pioneer drives are fine, they are mostly but some have sleep issues in OS X.

Now a lot of drives are plug and play but a little research to avoid those with sleep/wake issues is just good advice, speaking of which the LITE-ON iHES112 does not support sleep on OS X.

Find a drive you like read/write speed etc and then just type the model number and the words 'sleep' 'os x' in google and you'll soon see if it has any issues.

I had no idea of this - thanks for the info.

 

[monkeybagel]

Cars use CD's for music. Floppy disks were not used for music.

That would be a humorous thought of a 1.44MB floppy drive in the dash of a car. I guess you could get one very poor quality MP3 on it!

 

[JoeRito]

... I just think many people overlook the usefulness of some technology and Apple clearly benefits from this by 1)selling more external Superdrives at a premium and 2)funneling people into the iTunes store. This is not a win for the consumer.

Exactly, optical disk media is still insanely useful, easy to store, long lasting, and universal in its employment. Fact is, Apple wants us married to the App Store and iTunes. Both are excellent sites and are practical, but not everyone agrees with the model that's been set up for online storage and online downloading. Some of us prefer the option to have cheap, local, removable storage for audio and video files... and other files.

 

[monkeybagel]

Exactly, optical disk media is still insanely useful, easy to store, long lasting, and universal in its employment. Fact is, Apple wants us married to the App Store and iTunes. Both are excellent sites and are practical, but not everyone agrees with the model that's been set up for online storage and online downloading. Some of us prefer the option to have cheap, local, removable storage for audio and video files... and other files.

Apple makes it really easy to click that buy button on a $1.29 song or $149.00 application rather than waiting on the application in the mail or going to the store to get the application or the CD, but when I have the CD, I have it for life (typically). I still have games I install from the late 1990s on occasion, and I have a strange feeling that many of these will 1) be updated/enhanced in the App Store to not work on obsolete/older hardware and 2)not be available at all.

OS X is a good example that comes to mind. On occasion, a .1 update with OS X breaks an application. With DVDs, you can pop in the media and do a reinstall and get to where you need to be. The older versions of OS X (10.8.0/10.8.1, 10.7.0, etc) are simply not available from the MAS. And for people that use these machines to make their money, that is a real challenge. I think I have about every version of Lion and Mountain Lion archived in a DMG for that reason (I am a data packrat) but for people that don't do that, it can really cause a problem.

 

[scottsjack]

STOP - The people replying here saying ANY drive with a SATA or IDE interface will be fine are wrong. Some drives do not support sleep in OS X, research the issue and you'll see it is a known problem. If a drive has sleep issues it does not 'wake' with the machine making the whole power saving option 'Put drives to sleep when possible' non-functional. A drive with this issue will not appear is OS X if the system sleeps the drives after non-usage, it crashes disk utility and system information if you try these after sleep.

Now this thread has already had advice of ANY drive working fine - that's wrong. Someone mentioned Pioneer drives are fine, they are mostly but some have sleep issues in OS X.

Now a lot of drives are plug and play but a little research to avoid those with sleep/wake issues is just good advice, speaking of which the LITE-ON iHES112 does not support sleep on OS X.

Find a drive you like read/write speed etc and then just type the model number and the words 'sleep' 'os x' in google and you'll soon see if it has any issues.

I've been using an LG WH10LS30 from OWC for about two years. I chose it based on forum advice at the time regarding sleep issues with Pioneer and other brands. My 2010 Mac Pro's EOM drive is in a box somewhere. The LG has done all the optical work since it was installed.

My LG has worked without fail all this time. To be honest I've never burned a Blu-ray disc but I've burned DVDs and CDs, and played plenty of Blu-ray discs either as movies or to supply data to MakeMKV on both Mac and Windows. Based on my experience I would get an LG again.

 

[SDAVE]

I had no idea of this - thanks for the info.

I remember fitting 64kbit Mono MP3's on Floppys back in the day