Blu ray drives aren't all that expensive if you know where to look. I picked up myself a sweet drive back in best buy for only $170, and it is made by HP: It has DVD reading/burning, CD Reading Burning up to 64x, DVD dual layer burning/reading, DVD quad layer reading/burning, Lightscribe laser engraving, and of course, Blu-Ray reading/burning. I burned a blu-ray disc for part of my backup volume (about 25GB out of my total 144.23GB backed up now.) and my iMac G4 took about 3.2 hours burning it. I decided to get one for my G5 iMac but put it through an external enclosure and through firewire and it only took 1 hour to burn a 25GB image.
My iMac g4 takes 15-22 minutes average burning a 7GB image.... my G5 iMac only takes 10-13 minutes at most, 9 minutes was the shortest ever. Also, don't go through with USB. USB IS SLOW..... it lags even on USB 3.0. To save time, get firewire to make sure the speeds are good. I made this mistake by buying a USB powered external DVD drive to install leopard on my Power Mac G4 sawtooth, and installation took 5-6 hours, but IDK because the intro video woke me up. I know that most of you think that the G4 sawtooth is slow, but in reality even for the G4 sawtooth 5 hours is VERY slow. at most my G4 sawtooth takes about the same amount of time as any other macs would take to install leopard, even the intel machines which was 1.5 hours. I later got that blu ray drive (which is now in my iMac) and i tested it and it only took 1.5 hours to install leopard. Basically, my advice: USB is good for transferring small things. Anything larger than 10-20Gb should be handled by firewire. This is just some advice from a person (me) who needs fast transfer speeds. I have an 80GB EIDE 10,000 RPM HDD in there (it cost me $179.99) and it has a transfer speed of about 37MB/s whenever i copy or move something onto the same thing or anything else in the system except for USB. -- You received this message because you are a member of the iMac Group, a group for those using Apple iMacs and eMacs. The list FAQ is at http://lowendmac.com/imac/list.shtml and our netiquette guide is at http://www.lowendmac.com/lists/netiquette.shtml To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To leave this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/imaclist
