Just bought a Mac Mini

[zMacintoshz]

i Just bought a brand new mac mini 2011 base model ($599) and put in 4gbs of ram. hooked it up to my tv in my room through hdmi
i bought this my a bunch of apple gift cards i was given for my 18th birthday, and i only paid $30 from my pocket. I'm using this mac as what i call a media base station.
I'm using it to transfer all my media( pictures and video) to my hard drives.
also i have a bunch of dvds on it that i can access through my apple tv in my living room
3) i use it to capture my xbox360 game plays.


i was wondering besides an apple super drive is there a better drive out there, and if there is what would you recommend.

 

[paulrbeers]

Just about any USB DVD drive will work. There's really no reason to spend $70 on an Apple Super drive when $20-30 will do just the same.

 

[Mojo1]

Unless you need the SuperDrive "look" there are equally capable drives at Amazon for around $40. Since the optical drive used in Apple products is cheaply-made of largely plastic components and is likely to fail if used very much, I suggest saving some money and skipping the Apple product.

If you need an external drive for your new MacMini NewerTech is introducing an optical drive/harddrive enclosure with up to 3TB storage that matches the MacMini. But when I last checked around a week ago it wasn't available yet and I think that the combo enclosure is going to be expensive.

http://www.newertech.com/products/ministackmax.php

 

[David085]

Enjoy your new Mac mini

 

[btbrossard]

You could also think about getting a blu-ray optical drive for your mini.

Read only blu-ray drives are not much more than the Apple drive and Read/Write drives are in the $150 range depending on where you get it.

A note would be that you need extra software to watch blu-ray movies on your mac. OSX doesn't natively support watching blu-ray content.

 

[David085]

I have a external Samsung Blu-ray Drive read only for watching blu-ray movies with a 3rd party software that I pay for the license for I haven't been watching alot of movies lately

 

[DrakkenWar]

Agreed here!

I use and old and albeit noisy MadDog DVD/RW hooked up to my i5 for all my external media drives needs. It was open box at the BX here, so all said and done viable media drive for around 25 bones. And it came in a black and aluminum case! Going apple all the way if you have the money?:roll eyes: Why not. But for those of us on a budget? Find the solution that works the best.

~Drake

 

[Confuzzzed]

I have a Samsung SE-S084D with my mac mini and it works well, it's also slim enough to put in a briefcase if I ever want to use it together with my macbook air.