External Optical Drive

3 Mar 2018 11:05:20

Trevor Hewson

After functioning pretty much faultlessly throughout my recent CD-importing project, the optical drive on our 9 year old iMac now seems to have gone on strike. On being offered a disk, at the point where it should draw it in, it instead spits it out.

Unless it recovers spontaneously in the next week or so, We’ll be looking to buy an external drive so I’d be interested in any recommendations. As usual the Apple one is around £80 but third party drives are available from about £17. I don’t need an ultra-slim Ive-designed piece of aluminium artwork but would like something reasonably reliable. Now if only Siri could understand requests like that. . . .

Re: External Optical Drive

4 Mar 2018 10:32:58

Eric Jervis

I can highly recommend the Apple one though, and if you order it from John Lewis you get an excellent guarantee!

Re: External Optical Drive

4 Mar 2018 22:42:48

Tony Still

I have a vague memory of issues with this; if you hit problems it might be worth following up:
I seem to recall that a Mac originally supplied with an in-built optical drive would not accept an external (USB) optical drive (not withstanding the failure of the in-built drive). This dates back to our buying a first generation MacBook Air plus the requisite external drive (the Apple one, as it happens). At that time, there was a simple tweak to a Preference List or something that would enable the then-new external drive on iMac etc.

Re: External Optical Drive

5 Mar 2018 08:43:29

Trevor Hewson

Thanks Tony. On Eric's recommendation, I did take a closer look at the Apple Superdrive and sure enough it lists compatibility with iMacs from late 2012, which I guess is when they stopped having an internal drive.

Being a cheapskate, I'd already looked at whether I could use our old MacBook's drive in remote mode. The answer seemed to be yes for reading files but not for most of the things I might actually want to do, such as importing audio CDs. I'll see if I can find out more before spending £80 on something that's not even heavy enough to do duty as a doorstop.

Re: External Optical Drive

5 Mar 2018 08:59:25

Trevor Hewson

Stop Press: Resetting the SMC seemed to be a recommended first thing to try so, before doing so, I thought I would just check that the fault was still showing.

I'm sure you're ahead of me now! The drive took the disc without hassle and began playing it (it was a video DVD). It also ejected cleanly so, for the moment at least, the problem with the internal drive has gone away.

Just to be clear, the only 'treatment' the iMac has received has been an overnight sleep. I'm going to leave well enough alone for now but if anyone has any theories how the drive could be repaired while the iMac is asleep, I'd be interested!

Re: External Optical Drive

6 Mar 2018 18:28:29

Rick Churchill

If you find indeed that you need an external DVD drive then I use an LG Slim Portable DVD writer Model GP57EW40 which I bought from PC World for about £20. I bought it because it was white!
At one point it seemed to fail to work but Tony laid his hands on it at our last meeting and suddenly it fired up and has worked ever since. I suspect that it was something I did.

Re: External Optical Drive

7 Mar 2018 10:46:25

Trevor Hewson

Thanks Rick. So far though, the internal drive is working. I’m resisting the urge to test it every day whether it’s needed or not, but still feel the need to say ‘please’ before I offer it a disc!

Re: External Optical Drive

28 Mar 2018 16:43:52

John Surtees

If you look on Amazon they have a player/recorder for under 20 quid that looks the spitting image of one that Ive had for years. Although its calledCoo, I think it’s got Panasonic internals. Self powered USB 3. Works like a dream. Hear is the Amazon description:

External DVD CD Drive USB 3.0 - Coo Portable Slim DVD USB Burner Drive Player Writer Reader CD-RW / DVD-RW Player for Macbook Air/Pro, Laptop, Desktop...

Re: External Optical Drive

29 Mar 2018 09:17:22

Trevor Hewson

Thanks John. If the problem returns, I'll bear that in mind. I've not used the internal drive for the last three weeks, so assume that it is still working - ignorance is bliss!