End of an era: Apple's SuperDrive has sold out after 16 years | Hacker News Reader

End of an era: Apple's SuperDrive has sold out after 16 years

appleinsider.com

49 pointsbookofjoe40 comments

I bought one of these years ago when my 2015 Macbook Pro was still my primary computer, which I used until the M1 Max was released. However, the thing sat on a shelf unused. I still have DVDs and CD-ROMs in the house with what I consider to be important data/files, or movies you simply can't stream, but life always got in the way.

Last weekend, with the wife away on a trip, I pulled a DVD I'd been given last year after the death of a relative. It was filled with movie files an uncle had recorded when he'd visited during the birth of my first child 17 years ago. Since the SuperDrive is USB-A, I pulled out my old 2015 MBP (still a great machine) and popped in the disk. After a few moments I was looking at AVI clips that felt as if I had stepped through time. Seeing relatives now gone, other relatives so young - all of us were. And my daughter, just a couple days old looking like a sleeping grub worm in a blanket.

After that experience I moved everything to cloud storage and started looking for more discs. Makes me think I should get a Mac Mini and use the SuperDrive as an old-school video/audio media machine.

This dongle won't provide enough power for the drive on a modern MBP:

https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MW5L3AM/A/usb-c-to-usb-ad...

This dongle will provide enough power:

https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MW5M3AM/A/usb-c-digital-a...

$70 is a lot for a dongle, but a lot cheaper than a whole new computer.

But not a lot cheaper than a USB BD-R drive without captive cable that doesn't require either dongle.

Yes, very true. Although if you go this route you’d better look at the specs closely. Amazon is filled with drives that run USB 2.0 speeds over a USB-C cable.

If the dvd/cds you burned have any important data, best to pull that off, because those discs degrade over time, and fairly quickly than you may expect. Get a good usb drive and put that in a firesafe.

Doesn't flash storage need to be plugged in occasionally, or else it suffers data loss from the cell charges dissipating?

I thought a mechanical hard drive was the go-to consumer-level way to backup long-term (tapes being higher but harder).

So a physical hard drive is better long term archival storage than SDD?

Depends on what you're going against, I'd wager.

Mechanical HDDs are far more shock sensitive. One good drop and the bits are physically damaged by the head hitting the platter.

If you move often perhaps USB SSDs are better. A little more rugged and accessible, with occasional power as the trade-off.

The cell powering is overstated. I just wouldn't expect to go a really long time on your only drive. Have many/play the odds. Reading the data occasionally to verify sums would suffice to recharge. So could appending to the archive!

Tape is great for density and shock sensitivity, but doesn't handle magnetism or moisture as well. Random access is awful, so recovering from this may be as well. This really shines in terms of density.

All this to say, I wouldn't store data I cared about in a hard to access or irregular place.

Not all the same place, but readily accessible such that restoring, maintenance, or establishing quorum is feasible. A safe deposit box sounds nice, is wildly impractical.

The houses of friends or family are just as effective, or misc. S3 providers. Many is best, in short. Not just one.

Something like once every ten years

I've had flash drives go bad after months or even weeks so I'm dubious about your ten years claim. Probably depends on the type of flash chip, quality, etc but still overall worse than the alternatives.

high quality is the key 2023: https://www.pcworld.com/article/2037550/how-long-does-data-l....

While these are nostalgic, I prefer the portable Pioneer drives nowadays. They read UHD blu-rays and have support for MakeMKV.

They even make one in the same design as the SuperDrive. https://usa.pioneer/products/bdr-xs07s

> They read UHD blu-rays and have support for MakeMKV.

List:

* https://forum.makemkv.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=19634

Good callout.

I have an older BDR-XS06 (bought 7 years ago already now), and it works well when I need it to (which exceedingly rare).

A few months ago, my USB SuperDrive kicked the bucket after 10 years of use. I brought it to the Apple Store and asked for a replacement. They found it amusing, and said they hadn't sold one in a long time. They had to rummage around in the back for 10 minutes, and apparently only had two in stock. Maybe I should have bought both.

I replaced my SuperDrive with this OWC Blu-Ray and DVD drive for about the same price or lower. I bought six or seven of them when I was ripping my entire movie collection to disk (yay Plex). The SuperDrive is slightly lower-profile, but these work well and I've never had any issues with them. I gave most away to friends when the job was done and the one I have left is still kicking for ripping new music from CDs once in a blue moon.

https://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/MR3PDVDR8XT/

Isn't this one the bluray one? https://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/MR3PBDR6XT/

It seems the one you linked to can only support DVD and M-Disc.

Sad that even now, the only way, to get high quality movies is by buying physical bluray discs since streaming media has vastly worse bitrate.

Recommended for desktop: OWC Mercury Pro enclosure[1] with your choice of MakeMKV-compatible[2] internal 5.25" SATA drive.

USB 3.0 B plug and separate PSU; no dongles or bus power required.

[1] https://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/MR3UKIT/

[2] https://forum.makemkv.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=19634

On the brighter side you should be good until around 2034.

$77.99 here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B011K4XZQ0/?tag=reality

I was in the market for an optical drive recently. The SuperDrive would have been the obvious choice, since I’d be using it with a Mac, but when I looked at how old it was, I could only assume it was new old stock. I opted for an LG instead. It’s worked great, and should work great cross platform, should I ever need to use it on other platforms.

I almost grabbed one of these a few years ago when I was finally ripping all of my DVD's, but ended up just getting a cheap one off Amazon but its finicky.

How was the reliability of these things? Did it just generally work and didn't complain except for old age? I see that there are still some on Amazon so wondering if its worth just caving for the random times I do actually need to read an old disk or something.

I have one. Plug it directly into the laptop, using an Apple adapter if necessary. It does something wonky with usb that does not work well with hubs or cheap adapters.

It can be genuinely difficult to find optical drives that aren't crap these days. All of the quality manufacturers left the scene years ago, so everything is a rebadged no-name Chinese cost optimized system, at least for DVDs. Blu-Ray might be in better shape, I have not messed with them much.

That does seem to be my impression, and I can't exactly blame the situation. I mean realistically how many drives that are not in video game consoles are we realistically selling anymore?

Even less at this smaller scale (I always assumed the SuperDrive was nearly identical parts as what was once in the MBP and other Mac's) that many of these portable drives are at.

I so rarely actually need one, but it might be worth just grabbing one and it sitting somewhere so its there.

I think the easiest way to do this is get a used sata drive from a name brand, and a usb to sata adapter.

When it comes to data archival, I always wondered if we can get paper to reach a nice density. Wikipedia says around 3MB per 8x10 page, but I wonder is JAB code can reach a higher density.

https://github.com/jabcode/jabcode/issues/62

People talk about dataglyphs, but the density doesn't appear very high.

I bought one for my father’s iMac in 2020 and they shipped me three of them, so I helped contribute to the depletion.

https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MD564LL/A/apple-usb-super...

I have an LG blu ray drive that I still make occasional 100gb backups on. Not sure how much sense it makes as terabyte drives are cheap today. But I think ssds degrade over time, don’t they?

I looked at bluray for backups, but decided it wasn't all that great. Price per TB is too high, storage per disk is too small, and it's kind of slow.

I've found that LTO tape is great for backups. Used LTO5 drives can be had relatively cheaply on ebay, and so can the tapes. I pay about $5.50/Terabyte for tapes. I paid about $150 for the LTO5 tape drive and about $30 for a SAS HBA card. Overall it's way cheaper than hard drive storage, and LTO5 writes at 140MB/s which is far faster than bluray which has a max write speed of 54MB/s. Tapes are said to have greater than 30 years lifespan, so I'm not likely to outlive my tape backups at this point.

More so than HDDs fail?

Yes, supposed to go dead after a year+ unplugged.

So do optical disks.

Supposed to go dead after a year+ unplugged. My burnt CDs from ‘97 working fine.

I kind of wonder when they actually stopped being manufactured? It seems like the kind of thing you'd build some large amount of and then just slowly whittle away the stock.

I was looking into buying one of these last month, but they never upgraded them to have Blu-Ray compatibility. Steve Jobs apparently hated BluRay and refused to support it natively on MacOS and it's still quite painful to get it working on macOS today. You can get a Buffalo BDXL drive for about the same price as Apple's DVD-only SuperDrive.

As I recall, Jobs hated the Blu-ray software stack, which included mandatory use of a JVM:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BD-J

“Big bag of hurt” was the expression, IIRC.

Bluray is pretty much plug and play even writing data with on board tools. There is no native video playback but VLC does it without problems. I wouldn’t call it not supported…

I seem to recall the original issue with supporting Blu-ray is that Sony required a root-kit to verify playback authorization and was monitoring everything for pirated content. There were some expensive playback software licensing issues too. It is one reason even consoles were hesitant to adopt it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com