Okay, here's an update.
I went ahead and ordered the Kanguru 20x FW/USB drive, and by
now have tried a few things.
First of all, I was impressed at the responsiveness of their
sales staff to an email question about whether I could return
the drive if I found it too noisy. (Their policy requires that I
pay return shipping.)
The shipping cost was a steep $14, but it arrived promptly via
UPS ground within 3 working days (I ordered on Friday before MLK
day, and it arrived on Wednesday, as they predicted). The total
was $98.98, including shipping.
The drive was advertised to require no drivers, so I was
disconcerted when the firewire connection, using the included
chintzy-looking cable, simply wasn't recognized. I messed
around with drivers on the included CD's, which had
distressingly old software, including versions for OS 9. I
installed the included Dragon Burn software for OS X, to no
avail.
Then I tried USB, with the included cable, and the drive was
recognized.
Finally, I substituted a firewire cable known to work, and the
drive was recognized; so I concluded that their firewire cable
was defective, while their USB cable was not.
Next, I used Toast 8.0.3 to burn a CD. I use only name-brand
media, and I have plenty of hard drive space and RAM. It hung
at about the 90% stage of verification, but the disk seems ok.
Numerous problems with Toast 8.0.x and leopard are reported in
discussions at the Roxio website, including problems with
verification.
Then I tried to copy my leopard install disk onto a Sony 8x,
DVD+R DL disk, again with Toast. That claimed to go at about
5x, but claimed to fail on writing the final-output-whatever
stage. The result is nevertheless moutable and readable, but
not bootable. Then I tried using the DVD/CD master mode of Disk
Utility, reading from the Kanguru, to create an image, which
eventually failed with an input/ouput error. Same thing
happened on a repeat. Now I'm trying to do that again, reading
from the internal SuperDisk drive... It's going much, much
slower..., really, really slow..., and finally failed
(unfortunately I forgot to write down the reason).
Then I noticed that the install disk is DVD-ROM, so it doesn't
sound surprising there would be a problem with a literal copy to
DVD+R DL. If that's the case, neither Toast, nor maybe Apple's
Disk Utility, detects the incompatibility between source and
destination media.
The drive turns out not to be noisy, at least when it's not
burning, and the fan (I guess) is audible but not that noisy
even then.
So far I haven't tried the Lightscribe capability.
I've done a few other things, mostly reading, a little writing.
All in all, there has been no problem that couldn't be
attributed to Toast or improper choice of media or media not up
to spec. I'm keeping the drive, and hoping Roxio gets their act
together. I like it so far.
-- David
