Panasonic Blu-ray SW-5582 writer

[SirHaakon]

Originally Posted by monkeytap

the drive is IDE or whatever, not SATA. what type of computer you have?

Ah, my bad! I saw that you had the fastmac drive and I just assumed it was SATA. Their new 4x drive *is* SATA, but their older 2x one (which I am guessing is the one you have?) is not.

I have a new (2008) Mac Pro and I have been waiting for Apple to announce BD-R support for quite some time, but since they're still speechless on the topic I have decided to go with a third party drive now that my new machine is here. Unfortunately, the optical drives in the new Mac Pros are STILL IDE, so it makes installing a SATA optical drive much more difficult. There *are* two free SATA connectors on the motherboard which one can access for this purpose, but it involves removing the fan assembly and CPU heat sink to gain access to them - as well as buying a bunch of spare parts to make it work - and it's quite the hassle. Still, to me it is worth it if I could get the drive to function correctly and be internal - problem is many people have said that while it's possible to read BD-ROM discs with a SATA drive you can't write to them. My main purpose for having a BD-R drive is to create high def video discs (not to watch commercial Blu-ray movies - I have a PS3 and an HDTV for that), so getting the burning part to work is extremely essential.

The obvious answer is to get one of the older IDE drives, but with 4x-6x drives being much more common now, it would be silly to buy last year's technology. Even with 2x media, there are reviews indicating that burning in 6x mode is reliable and a huge time saver. So I am 95% sure I am going to purchase the LG GGW-H20L drive (6x BD-R for under $300!) and was just trying to figure out the best way to attach it to my Mac (since it too is a SATA drive). But I have just decided to use an external SATA enclosure (with USB2 ports), as it is not only the most compatible way to use the drive but will allow me to connect it to other computers should I need to. I wanted to get a firewire enclosure since the throughput seems to be better than USB2.0 (hence my question to you), but I have yet to find one that is natively SATA on the inside. There are a couple USB models out there, so that's the direction I'm taking.

Sorry for the long-winded answer, but I figure if there is anyone else out there trying to do the same thing I am it might save them some time. If anyone has any questions about the drive, please feel free to send me a PM - I've done an enormous amount of research on this and have covered pretty much every base at this point.