While our stopwatch says the drives are virtually identical, they differ in other ways, including price, case design, and bundled software (see “DVD Burners Compared”). Macworld Lab tested six exter-nal DVD burners: the DVD-R/RW+CD-RW FireWire Pro2, from APS Tech the DVD Revo, from CD Cyclone the ClubMac FireWire DVD-R/RW, from ClubMac the Boa FireWire DVD-R/RW, from EZQuest the LaCie DVD/CD Rewritable Drive, from LaCie and the Que Fire DVDBurner Pro, from QPS. Although they’re not called SuperDrives, they are super drives. Several storage vendors now sell external drives that contain the same Pioneer mechanism and connect to a Mac or Windows computer via FireWire. Designed and built by Pioneer, the SuperDrive is included in the top two G4 system models.īut you don’t have to buy a new desktop Mac to get a DVD burner. The DVD-burning trend began when Apple added the SuperDrive to its top-of-the-line Power Mac G4. And of course, you can burn CDs using CD-R or CD-RW media. With Mac OS X 10.1, you can also use your DVD burner to back up files through the Finder.

Today’s optical drive of choice is aDVD burner, which lets you create video discs that play in most consumer DVD players.