Q: No DVD drive in new iMac ???

Agreed pacobell73. So is my business. Almost 80 hr. of h.264 video archived on 6 bluray discs (at a material cost of only $5) this week for customers... And I'm laughing all the way to the bank at those who say optical is dead.

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.

Wow this petty argument has gone a little too far. 25 messages in my mail today. And no  not turning off mail notifications. In fact i cant.. just buy and external disk drive and stop crying. There we go problem solved good night!

Well!!! I think it's a pretty interesting debate. That’s why it’s sooo long… It's not only about the simple idea of YES/NO to DVD it's also about how much 'accessorizing' can a computer withstand. Besides I’ve learned a lot about DVD tech!

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.

justamacguy wrote:

 

"iMacs are designed for people who actually want to look at their data once in a while."

 

This is a hilarious statement to me... not so much to my friend who works in a title company. His iMac hard drive crashed with no backup. It was either pay the $1,600 for the data recovery or shutter his business. To bad... the money he spent on data recovery could have purchased a whole other computer for the business.

Your friend should have had the commonsense to backup his data, before he found out the hard way. Maybe one as experienced as you should have showed him how?

Losing data is what happens with no backup, now hopefully has learned the lesson.

R C_R... We are kind of on the same track here and coming to middle ground in our arguments.

Optical is not the proper media for daily backups. There is no argument in that. But when it comes to specific archive where permanent storage is critical optical is the media with the longest lifespan. For instance your wedding video is something that you would like to keep all of your life (or at least until the divorce). Your kids first step. Your scanned title and financial documents. Family pictures. For daily viewing, yes, you want them on your hard drive or an immediate access drive. But… for safety you want those records on a media that is as indestructible as possible.

M-disc is an amazing step forward in this type of archiving. Even now, the extra price of the disc is worth the value, and I’m sure as it is adopted the price will drop. I just wish they would hurry and get the BluRay discs out. The are behind schedule on mass market release on those. Since many of hour wedding productions are under 20 minutes we can burn them in an HD formant of DVD using Encore for now. But it will be nice when the extra storage is available for the other half of our market which is converting analog tape to digital files. Which, of course, means storage of many hours of h.264 files on a BluRay data disc.

And yes, we are surviving this by buying external disc reader/writers. BUT, as a videographer, what really ticks me off is not as much the optical option in the iMac as the loss of the 17” Macbook with optical. However, that is for: 1. a different forum of Mac Professionals and 2. something that is not coming back no matter how hard I cry.

Yes, Csound-1... he learned the hard way. But he was using optical for backup. You can put thousands of text/spreadsheets on a DVD. Which is what he was set up to do... and didn't. He does now. And stores one onsight and one off sight.

justamacguy 

Optical is not the proper media for daily backups.

M-disc is an amazing step forward in this type of archiving.

Optical is for high risk "cannot be lost at any costs"

My peronal collection of 70 Gigabytes of work Ive spent 100 billion hours (lol) and 20 years on,  ...THATS on multiple DVD pro-grade archival burns

namely (of course) I cannot archive my 42 Terabyte collection on a Bazillion DVDs

Ive got mountains of hard drives and servers around the globe for that.

M-disk is new tech, and is unproven in the extreme. Indications are that its base layer is too soft

So while proven to survive the EM spectrum "light" tests,   apparently its a weakling in the scratch tests.

You and RCR are both right

Peace

PlotinusVeritas wrote:

 

 

Optical is for high risk "cannot be lost at any costs"

Whenever I need to secure data so that it will not be lost, I let my wife overhear it.

She (bless her) never forgets.

Well imho it can be yes or no. Depends what an individual wants. I have no need for dvd as most things come in an eletrical copy. Just so much easier!

Agreed.    And if Apple decides to delete the display to reduced size and heat, you'd see the same Apple apologists posting congratualory messages.

And until they do that's just more useless speculation. I'll file it with the rest.

Well an optical drive generates heat and takes up structure space...So they are removing a hot, large object (that from a general consumers point of view isn't needed) and reducing the screen size. Seems like a fair trade. Additionally, Apple are selling an external optical drive...so they have thought about it!

Where did you get the notion that a superdrive runs "hot"?

Its not the heat or space, as mentioned earlier, is the user fault in care / use of same, and that it is rather mechanical with moving parts.

other than fans, everything is approaching near-100% to no moving parts.