justamacguy wrote:
R C-R I'm not going to worry about what you are throwing out there. We do thosands of discs a year. We use Sony, Pioneer and LG drives, mostly with Taiyo Yuden (some Phillips or Ritek) and our failure rate is in the hundreths of a percent. In the last 2 years our customer satisfaction has been 100%. That's 0% complaints on our service and delivery.
If you visit Amazon, B&H and Adorama and look at customer satisfaciton responces they are all 4+ and 5 star on the M-disc recorders. That's a pretty good track record. If there was something wrong with them people are more willing to complain than to complement and that would show up in the reviews.
I'm not sure which of my (too many?) posts to this topic you are referring to, but just so there is no misunderstanding about it, I think the external, tray loading burners in general & the LG M-Disk burners in particular are definitely worth considering.
In fact, I'm considering getting one of the LG ones myself, even though I rarely burn a DVD these days & prefer to watch commercial DVD's on my big screen TV.
What I don't understand is all the anguish about Apple not including its so-called "SuperDrive" in the new iMacs. They aren't very super. They are relatively slow, don't support M-Disks or Blu-ray, & like all built-in slot loading drives are susceptible to the ingested contaminate problem previously mentioned. And it isn't like Apple could just add a higher performance burner to any of its recent iMacs, since none of the high performance, multi-format ones are slot loaders that would fit into anything less than about 6" deep.
Besides, for most users optical media isn't very practical for large scale data backups, archival or otherwise. I suspect like a lot of other users, I have tons of old CD's & DVD's I've burned over the years, but I have lost track of what's on which disc. Most of them probably only have a few hundred MB of data, much of it obsolete. Everything I have that is important to me is backed up on multiple hard drives, readily accessible & searchable should I ever need it. The really important stuff is stored inside checksummed disk image files that I verify from time to time to make sure the data is intact. It takes a little time to do that, & to maintain an offsite backup, but it is a tiny fraction of the time it would take to do the same thing with optical discs.
Nevertheless, I understand that for a lot of users the ability to burn optical discs is still important. I just don't understand why it is so important to them for the burner to be built into their iMacs. No matter how you look at it, at least if you do so realistically, it involves design compromises that I think most users would not find desirable if they were fully aware of them.
But to each his or her own. If no built-in burner is a deal breaker for you, then don't buy one of the new iMacs.
