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Apple SuperDrive Gets Faster....For Free
garaxiel writes "Just made a punch over to apple's website to notice a link detailing an update to all SuperDrives (or most; they provide a way to check if you're up to date) so that the superdrive can use the newer, faster media. Heck, if this is all I had to do to get a faster burner back in the day, I would have gladly switched to Apple!"
if this is all I had to do to get a faster burner back in the day, I would have gladly switched to Apple!
So do it now.
Dave
I write a blog now, you should be afraid.
So, your drive doesn't get faster. In fact, if you buy the wrong kind of media, it gets slower.
"The worst tyrannies were the ones where a governance required its own logic on every embedded node." - Vernor Vinge
You do not get a faster SuperDrive than you currently have. You'd know that if you had actually read the page you linked to rather than spasmodically sending it straight to Slashdot. From the same page:
"Will this update enable my 2x SuperDrive to write at a higher speed?
This update enables you to read from and write to the new media, but it does not increase the speed of the drive."
As I said the other day, I thought that previewing was supposed to help improve accuracy?
This update has been out for months. The drives, as shipped, would destroy themselves if they encountered fast media. This patch makes them able to write the new media, but they still run at the rated speed of the drive. They don't burn any faster with this patch.
Document Posted 11-07-2002.
This is five months old.
It's only when we've lost everything, that we are free to do anything...
The update doesn't make the drives write faster. The article, says that the update allows 4x media to be written to at 1x or 2x speeds on the SuperDrive. I believe it has something to do with the new 4x media being slightly different (I seem to recall that this also effects PC DVD-R drives as well, and similar updates are availible for those drives)
To quote directly from the FAQ:
Will this update enable my 2x SuperDrive to write at a higher speed?
This update enables you to read from and write to the new media, but it does not increase the speed of the drive. In fact, the updated 2x SuperDrive writes to this new media at 1x. So to obtain the highest performance from your 2x SuperDrive, we recommend that you continue using 2x DVD-R media just as you do today.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
Hmm, I wonder if that means you can't update an aftermarket drive in the latest PowerMacs, which supposedly do not boot natively to OS 9? Buyer beware, I guess.
Say hello to zMac.
Document Posted: 11-17-2002.
News From Under Rocks. Stuff That's Moldy.
.@.
How does one "make a punch" to a web site?
It depends on the drive, but there are two parts to the Pioneer firmware: kernel & general
What firmware updater you can apply depends upon what kernel your drive was most recently installed with. If you can get the kernel installer from Apple, you can make the drive look like an Apple-supplied unit and Apple's OS X firmware updaters will work for you. If not, you could always find a way to install the non-Apple firmware parts into Apple's firmware updater package, right?
Jory
This update doesn't make you able to burn new media faster. It enables you to burn new media slower so that your drive doesn't catch on fire .
Just so you know.
I hereby place the above post in the public domain.
Superdrive, so what? I had one of these plugged into my Mac Plus. It let me burn 800K floppies and 1.4M floppies. Big deal, so they made a faster one; who uses floppies anymore anyway?