You'll need to go with an external Firewire or USB DVD burner.
Compatibility for the drive itself gets a bit tricky as Apple is
notorious for only supporting their own DVD drives. A number of
Mac-specific resellers have done the leg work to package up compatible
drives and/or drivers. Other World Computing is one. You can find their
external DVD drives here:
http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/firewire/optical-drives/
Note that a dual-layer DVD holds about 9GB. USB2 typically gives about
15MB per second throughput so at best you can do about an 8x burner
which requires about 11MB per second sustained throughput. You might
have to drop to 4x to be safe. Firewire 400 should have no issues as it
easily sustains 35MB per second throughput which means you should be
able to go 20x on your DVD burns.
After all that, if all you need is more storage, just get an external
firewire drive or network attached storage (NAS). If you hook up a NAS
via GigaBit Ethernet you can actually move stuff faster than Firewire
800. Probably will hit the limits on what your laptop drive can handle.
Using wireless you'll be limited to what the real throughput of your
wireless network is. 802.11g has a theoretical throughput of 54Mbs but
you'll usually get about 20 or less depending on how far away from the
transmitter you are, how many walls/floors you're going through etc.
That means about 2MB per second more or less. Enough to do some nice
streaming media and web surfing but pretty pokey for disk storage. Also,
TimeMachine will only work with local connected drives or Apple's Time
Capsule for wireless. I'm using a local firewire Western Digital 500GB
myBook for backups and extra storage which has been working well. Costco
has them for about $120.
CB
Mike's Western Account wrote:
hey;
ok so here's our situation. Me and sabrina both ordered new mac's,
however neither of us upgraded them to dvd burners. Now is there any
place out there, a place to order either wireless dvd burners or
networkable dvd burners?
Also what about wireless or networkable hard disks? I bet we will fill
up our 120gb hd's quite quickly
thanks
please help if you can
Mike
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