Superdrive replacement?

Welcome to Apple Discussions!

Starting you off:

For internal drives, have a look at http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/mac-mini/superdrive/ and for external units, http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Other%20World%20Computing/MRBFWU2D112/ would be my choice at reasonable cost. I believe OWC ship worldwide so you should not have problem obtaining the drive from them, and their reputation as long-standing retailers in the Mac community make them a good bet.

While Apple may ship Macs with drives that have slightly customised firmware, they will very happily use absolutely standard drives as well (I speak from experience having replaced numerous out of warranty DVD drives in PowerMacs at the office).

I would avoid the Matsushita / Panasonic drives as they have particularly aggressive DVD region protection.

My latest Mac mini has a Pioneer DVR-K06 as the Apple supplied SuperDrive, just search on Google.co.uk for that, prices seem to be between £30 and £35.

I was wondering how happy you are with the DVR-K06? I want to replace the superdrive in my Powerbook because I'm tired of the slow DVD burning speed. Even on reasonable quality DVDs it only burns at 1x and on cheaper no name disks it won't burn at all.

Did Apple know that all of the Mac Mini Super drives were going to stop after a year or two?


It seems as if it's almost every Mac Mini with a Superdrive. And this was suppose to be my intro to Apple?


It really doesn't make me very confident in my next Apple purchase.

Toby Hamilton wrote:
Did Apple know that all of the Mac Mini Super drives were going to stop after a year or two?
It seems as if it's almost every Mac Mini with a Superdrive. And this was suppose to be my intro to Apple?
It really doesn't make me very confident in my next Apple purchase.

I have not had any Mac mini DVD drives fail (yet), only much older PowerMac ones. If it is merely read/writing problems rather than it completely dying and not being seen any more by the Mac, then it might simply be a matter of using a CD/DVD lens cleaner disk.

The Mac mini draws air in through the DVD drive slot and while there is a brush behind the slot to help keep out dust, some will still get in.

The failures I have had on old PowerMacs have been total such that the drive is not seen anymore (indicating a failure on the drives circuit board).

Did Apple know that all of the Mac Mini Super drives were going to stop after a year or two?

While not being much of a fan of the slot-loading drives used in the mini and Apple's laptops, I must say that there is very little indication that their long term reliability is much worse than any other drive. Given the sheer volume of sales of the various Mac mini models over the past (almost) three years, there has not been the surge in drive failure reports here that would certainly have happened if 'almost every Mac Mini with a Superdrive' had failed as you suggest.

Without doubt some have done so - but there is no indication that the failure rate would justify caution over any further Apple purchase.