Disc Driver For Mac

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The Macintosh External Disk Drive is the original model in a series of external ​3¹⁄₂-inch floppy disk drives manufactured and sold by Apple Computer exclusively for the Macintosh series of computers introduced in January 1984. Later, Apple would unify their external drives to work cross-platform between the Macintosh and Apple II product lines, dropping the name 'Macintosh' from the drives. Though Apple had been producing external floppy disk drives prior to 1984, they were exclusively developed for the Apple II, III and Lisa computers using the industry standard ​5¹⁄₄-inch flexible disk format. The Macintosh external drives were the first to widely introduce Sony's new ​3¹⁄₂-inch rigid disk standard commercially and throughout their product line. Apple produced only one external ​3¹⁄₂-inch drive exclusively for use with the Apple II series called the Apple UniDisk 3.5.

If your Mac has a SuperDrive or Disc drive, you can boot the Mac from any bootable DVD or CD by using a special keyboard shortcut. The bootable disc can be an OS X system restore disc, an OS X installation disc, or even a third party OS disc like Linux. How to Boot a Mac from a CD / DVD Disc. If you are going to sell, donate your Mac/device or just want to completely remove unwanted files and fix disk errors, Super Eraser for Mac is the best Mac disk formatting tool for you. It can help you regain a brand new disk. Note: formatted data will be permanently lost, can’t be recovered by any software or method. Mac Disk Utility. If you choose to use another Mac, you can do this with a program like Roxio's Toast, or Disk Utility (you will first need to create an image in Disk Utility, then burn the image to disc). VersionTECH is one of the leading brands in manufacturing high-quality CD/DVD drives for Mac. The most useful feature on this drive is that there is no eject button. And you are not supposed to use any driver program or extra power supply as it can be powered by the USB port.

400K[edit]

The original Macintosh External Disk Drive (M0130) was introduced with the Macintosh on January 24, 1984. However, it did not actually ship until May 4, 1984, sixty days after Apple had promised it to dealers. Bill Fernandez was the project manager who oversaw the design and production of the drive.^[1] The drive case was designed to match the Macintosh and included the same 400-kilobyte drive (a Sony-made ​3¹⁄₂-inch single-sided mechanism) installed inside the Macintosh. Although very similar to the 400-kilobyte drive which newly replaced Apple's ill-fated Twiggy drive in the Lisa, there were subtle differences relating mainly to the eject mechanism. However, confusingly all of these drives were labelled identically. The Macintosh could only support one external drive, limiting the number of floppy disks mounted at once to two, but both Apple and third party manufacturers developed external hard drives that connected to the Mac's floppy disk port, which had pass-through ports to accommodate daisy-chaining the external disk drive. Apple's Hard Disk 20 could accommodate an additional daisy-chained hard drive as well as an external floppy disk.

3.5-inch single-sided floppies had been used on several microcomputers and synthesizers in the early 1980s, including the Hewlett Packard 150 and various MSX computers. The standard on all of these was MFM with 80 tracks and 9 sectors per track, giving 360 kB per disk. However, Apple's custom interface uses Group Coded Recording (GCR) and a unique format which puts fewer sectors on the smaller inner tracks and more sectors on the wider outer tracks of the disk. The disk speeds up when accessing the inner tracks and slows down when accessing the outer ones. This is called the 'Zoned CAV' system; there are five zones of 16 tracks each, the inner most zone had 8 sectors per track, the next zone 9 sectors per track, and so on; the outermost zone has 12 sectors per track. This allows more space per disk (400 kB) and also improves reliability by reducing the number of sectors on the inner tracks which had less physical media to allocate to each sector.

The external 400-kilobyte Macintosh drive will work on any Macintosh that does not have a high density SuperDrive controller (due to electrical changes with the interface), but the disks in practice only support the MFS file system. Although a 400-kilobyte disk may be formatted with HFS, it cannot be booted from, nor is it readable in a Mac 128 or 512.

Copy protection schemes were not as elaborate or widespread on Macintosh software as they were on Apple II software for several reasons. First, the Mac drives did not afford the same degree of low-level control. Also Apple did not publish source listings for the Mac OS ROMs as they did with the Apple II. Finally, the Mac OS routines were considerably more complex and disk access had to be synchronized with the mouse and keyboard.

800K[edit]

By early 1985, it was clear that the Macintosh needed additional storage space, in particular a hard drive. Apple announced their first hard drive for the Mac in March 1985. However, the MFS file system did not support subdirectories, making it unsuitable for a hard disk. Apple quickly began adopting for the Mac the hierarchical based SOS filing system introduced with the Apple III and long since implemented in ProDOS for the Apple II series and the Lisa. This change in the Mac's filing system delayed the introduction of the double sided Sony drives which Apple intended to offer as soon as the technology was available, a concession they made when adopting the Sony drives over their own problematic double-capacity Twiggy drives.^[2][3] However, based on the success of the 3.5-inch floppy drive for the Mac, there was no such obstacle in immediately implementing an 800-kilobyte drive for the Apple II, so it was introduced in September 1985, four months before the version for the Mac. While Apple simultaneously introduced their new hard drive after a 6-month delay, they chose not to implement the new floppy drive for the Macintosh at that time.

Apple UniDisk 3.5[edit]

In September 1985, Apple released its first ​3¹⁄₂-inch drive (A2M2053) for the Apple II series utilizing Sony's new 800-kilobyte double-sided drive mechanism, which would not be released for the Macintosh until four months later. The Apple UniDisk 3.5 drive contained additional circuitry making it an 'intelligent' or 'smart' drive; this made it incompatible with the Macintosh, despite having the identical mechanism that was to be later used in the Macintosh drive. However, if the internal circuit board (which consisted of its own CPU, IWM chip, RAM and firmware) was bypassed it could operate on a Macintosh as an 800-kilobyte drive.^[4] This permitted storage-hungry Mac users the ability to double their disk capacity 5 months before Apple officially made an 800-kilobyte drive available for the Mac. At the time, the HD20 Startup disk came with HFS and a new .Sony driver that supported 800k drives (in addition to the HD20). Ironically, though the drive would prove to be significantly faster than the previous 400-kilobyte drive, it was specifically slowed down to accommodate the slower 1-megahertz processor of the Apple II. It came in the Snow White-styled case and color to match the Apple IIc and had a pass-through connector for the addition of a second daisy-chained drive. It plugged in directly to the Apple IIc disk port (although original IIcs needed a ROM upgrade) and required a specialized interface card on earlier Apple II models. It would later also work directly with the built-in disk port on the Apple IIc Plus and Apple IIGS through backwards compatibility. This was not recommended for the latter two machines as the Apple 3.5' Drive was faster. It continued to be sold for use with the Apple IIc and IIe which could not use the subsequent replacement Apple ​3¹⁄₂-inch drive, until the Apple IIc Plus redesign in 1988 and Apple II 3.5 Disk Controller Card released in 1991. Apple developed a DuoDisk 3.5 which contained two drives vertically stacked, but never brought it to market. The ​3¹⁄₂-inch format was not very popular in the Apple II community (excluding the 16-bit Apple IIGS) as most software was released in the 5.25-inch format to accommodate the existing installed Disk II drives.

Macintosh 800K External Drive[edit]

In January 1986, Apple introduced the Macintosh Plus which had a Sony double-sided 800-kilobyte capacity disk drive, and used the new HFS disk format providing directories and sub-directories. This drive was fitted into an external case as the Macintosh 800K External Drive (M0131), which was slimmer than the earlier 400-kilobyte drive. It could be used with Macintosh models except for the original 128K, which could not load the HFS disk format. The drive supported the older 400-kilobyte single-sided disks allowing them to be shared. The use of Apple's GCR with variable speed (as used on the 400-kilobyte drive) accommodated a higher storage capacity than its 720-kilobyte PC counterparts. In addition, the mechanism was much quieter and significantly faster than its predecessor. Designed primarily to run on Macs with the new 128-kilobyte ROM which contained the necessary code to support the drive, it could be used with Macs with older 64-kilobyte ROMs if the proper software was loaded from the system folder of a Hard Disk 20 into the Mac's RAM. The drive controlled its own speed and was no longer dependent on an external signal from the Mac, which was blocked on the early drive mechanisms compatible only with the Macintosh. Later universal mechanisms, first used on the Apple II to accommodate proprietary signals, required special cables to isolate the speed signal from the Mac, to prevent damage to the drive. However, with its increased storage capacity combined with 2-4 times the RAM available on the Mac Plus, the external drive was less of a necessity than it had been with its predecessors. Nevertheless, with the only option for adding additional storage being extremely expensive hard drives, a year later Apple increased the maximum number of floppy drives that could be accessed simultaneously to three on the Macintosh SE (the Macintosh Portable was the only other Mac to do so).

Apple 3.5' Drive[edit]

Beginning in September 1986, Apple adopted a unified cross-platform product strategy essentially eliminating platform-specific peripherals where possible. The Apple 3.5' Drive (A9M0106), is an 800K external drive released in conjunction with the Apple IIGS computer, and replaced the beige-colored Macintosh 800K External Drive. It works on both the Apple IIGS as well as the Macintosh. It came in a case similar to the UniDisk, but in Platinum gray. Like the UniDisk 3.5, the Apple 3.5' Drive includes Apple II-specific features such as a manual disk eject button and a daisy-chain connector which allows two drives to be connected to an Apple II computer. The Macintosh however could still only accommodate one external drive, and ignores use of the eject button. Unlike the Macintosh 800K External Drive, the Apple 3.5' Drive can be used natively with the 64-kilobyte ROM stock Macintosh 128K & 512K computers without the HD20 INIT, albeit only with 400K MFS formatted disks. Designed as a universal external drive replacement, the Apple 3.5' Drive was eventually made compatible with the remaining Apple II models in production upon the introduction of the Apple IIc Plus and the Apple II 3.5 Disk Controller Card for the Apple IIe.

1.44MB[edit]

Following the success of the Macintosh implementation of the ​3¹⁄₂-inch format, the format was also adopted widely by the personal computer industry. However most of the industry adopted a different Modified Frequency Modulation (MFM) formatting scheme at a fixed rotational speed, incompatible with Apple's own GCR with variable speed, resulting in a less-expensive drive, but with a lower capacity (720 KB rather than 800 KB). In 1987 a newer and better, MFM-based, 'high-density' format was developed which IBM first introduced in their PS/2 systems, doubling the previous storage capacity to 1.4 MB. In Apple's pursuit of cross-compatibility with DOS and Windows-based systems to attract more business customers, they adopted the new format, thus confirming it as the first industry-wide floppy disk standard. However, Apple could not take advantage of the less expensive fixed-speed systems of the IBM-based computers, due to its backward incompatibility with their own variable-speed formats.

Disc Drive For Mac

Apple FDHD Drive[edit]

Later renamed the Apple SuperDrive (G7287), the Apple FDHD Drive (Floppy Disk High Density) was introduced in 1989 as Apple's first external 1.44 MB high-density double-sided ​3¹⁄₂-inch floppy drive. It supported all of Apple's 3.5' floppy disk formats as well as all standard PC formats (e.g. MS-DOS, Windows), allowing the Macintosh to read and write all industry-standard floppy disk formats. The external drive was offered only briefly with support for the Apple II, coming late in that product's life. To take advantage of the drive's extended storage and new capabilities, it required the new SWIM (Sander-Wozniak Integrated Machine) floppy disk controller chip to be present on the Macintosh and Apple II, the latter requiring the Apple II 3.5 Disk Controller Card which integrated the chip. If the drive was connected to an older Macintosh, Apple IIGS or Apple IIc Plus with the older IWM (Integrated Woz Machine) chip, the drive would act as a standard 800K drive, without any additional capabilities. The interface card was necessary for the Apple IIGS to make use of its greater storage capacity and ability to handle PC formats. The Apple IIe could not utilize the drive in any form, unless it had the specialized interface card installed, much like the UniDisk 3.5 which the SuperDrive replaced. The last Mac it could be used with was the Classic II and was discontinued shortly thereafter. The drive was fitted in every desktop Mac from its introduction and was eliminated with the introduction of the iMac in 1998. PowerPC Macs dropped the original auto-inject Sony drives and went to a manual inject mechanism.

Macintosh HDI-20 External 1.4MB Floppy Disk Drive[edit]

Manufactured exclusively for use with the Macintosh PowerBook line, the Macintosh HDI-20 External 1.44MB Floppy Disk Drive (M8061) contained a low-powered, slimmer version of the SuperDrive and used a small square HDI-20^[5] proprietary connector, rather than the larger standard DE-19 desktop connector, and was powered directly by the laptop. It had a matching dark gray case and an access cover which flipped down to form a stand. The external drive was sold optionally for those PowerBooks which had no built-in drive, however, the identical drive mechanism was included internally in some PowerBook models, which otherwise had no provision to accommodate an external drive.

Macintosh PowerBook 2400c Floppy Disk Drive[edit]

Compatible only with the PowerBook 2400c, the Macintosh PowerBook 2400c Floppy Disk Drive (M4327) used a unique Molex connector ^[6] rather than the previous HDI-20 connector. Possibly because of the 2400c's IBM design heritage, both the drive and the computer use the same connectors as IBM ThinkPad external floppy drives from the same period; however, IBM drives are not electrically compatible.^[7]The drive was discontinued in 1998 and would be the last external floppy drive manufactured by Apple.

See also[edit]

References[edit]

1. ^Bill Fernandez Portfolio
2. ^MacTech Mousehole Vol 1, Issue 5, Letters, Rumor Mill at the Expo
3. ^[1] Folklore.org: Macintosh Stories: Quick, Hide In This Closet!
4. ^Naiman, Arthur (1987). The Macintosh Bible. Goldstein & Blair. p. 253. ISBN0-940235-00-5.
5. ^HDI-20
6. ^'PowerBook 2400c Developer Note'(PDF). Archived from the original on July 21, 2004. Retrieved September 30, 2016.CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link)
7. ^'2400c questions: Sound + PCMCIA Ethernet'. 68kMLA Forums. Retrieved September 30, 2016.

External links[edit]

• Macintosh: Support for External Floppy Drives (at Apple support site)
• vintagemacworld.com Apple External Drives

Apple has begun to stop installing CD/DVD drives since the introduction of MacBook Air in January 2008. Later, Apple discontinued manufacturing MacBook and iMac with optical drives in 2016 and mid-2011, respectively. With your new Mac devices, you are not able to run CDs or DVDs. For this purpose, you need to rely on external CD/DVD drives. Moreover, you need an external drive to import movies and music to iTunes. If you have got the latest MacBook or iMac (released after 2012 and 2016), you need to buy the best external CD/DVD drives.

1. Apple USB SuperDrive

Apple claims that its USB SuperDrive has everything you need in an optical drive. With simplicity, this external drive has state-of-the-art technology. You can connect this SuperDrive with your MacBook Pro with Retina display, MacBook Air, iMac, or Mac mini with a single USB Type A cable, which is built into this SuperDrive.

The design of this drive is compact as it is slightly bigger than a CD case. You can carry this SuperDrive anywhere in your travel bag or laptop bag. Use this drive on your desk or tray table. Check out the compatible devices.

USP: Compact design
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2. VersionTECH

VersionTECH is one of the leading brands in manufacturing high-quality CD/DVD drives for Mac. The most useful feature on this drive is that there is no eject button. And you are not supposed to use any driver program or extra power supply as it can be powered by the USB port.

VersionTECH has created a stylish design that features a durable metal finish with an elegant silver lid. The ultra-slim drive is convenient to carry anywhere. Among other notable features, this drive boasts are embedded cable, premium wire drawing material, low noise, and high durability.

USP: Ultra-thin design
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3. LG

LG is a renowned brand in the world of electronics. The brand has also manufactured top-notch accessories like power banks, Bluetooth headphones, keyboards, stylus and more. For your Mac, LG brings an ultra-slim DVD external drive. With its 8X DVD-R writing speed, you can quickly transfer data from your DVD or CD to your MacBook or iMac.

During the style evolution, LG’s optical drive has achieved a new status from slimmer to the slimmest. The product occupies little space on your desk and delivers the best performance every time you insert a CD or DVD.

USP: Superior data protection
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4. Cocopa

With its high-speed interface of USB 3.0, Cocopa can quickly transmit your data at the maximum speed of 5GBPS. This makes Cocopa an excellent choice of marketing executives, who have to make presentations in offices. The strong fault tolerance gives a stable performance.

For fashion-forward users, Cocopa has used brushed texture shell that gives you a good touch feeling. With its small size, you can carry this portable DVD drive with your laptop anywhere.

Disc Drive For Macbook Air

USP: Stable performance
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5. Gipow

Beating USB 2.0 and USB 1.0, Gipow has designed a USB 3.0 external drive for your Mac. Whether it is your movies, videos, or audio contents, you can quickly transfer everything to your Mac. If you don’t want to transfer audio/visual contents, you can watch or listen to the contents directly from the drive.

This CD/DVD drive is compatible with multiple operating systems, apart from macOS. It’s a plug-and-play drive you can install and use without any software or driver.

USP: Fashionable design
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#6. Rioddas

When I opened the package, I wondered there was no cable attached to this drive. Then I realized that the cable is smartly embedded at the bottom of this drive. This intelligent design can impress any user. This is the best portable drive for Mac owners, who have to travel extensively. The drive doesn’t occupy space in your travel bag or laptop bag.

Cd Driver For Mac

For better stability on any glossy surface, Rioddas has put a non-slip pad on the bottom. This non-slip pad prevents your drive from falling off your table or desk. The multi-functional CD/DVD drive can burn movies and music.

USP: Embedded cable design
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7. ISKE

Unlike other external CD/DVD drives that show eject button, ISKE doesn’t have that eject button. When you want to eject a CD or DVD from the drive, you can perform this action from your Mac.

ISKE’s external drive boasts intelligent design as it offers embedded cable design; users should not underrate this feature as it can protect the cable and makes your drive more portable.

USP: No eject button
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8. Botee

Botee has come up with a unique feature: voltage stabilization system. This system avoids high or low voltage lead. Thus, it can protect your computer from any damage. Bootee offers you free lifetime product warranty, 30-day product replacement or refund.

Universal compatibility of this drive enables it to work with multiple operating systems aside from macOS. This means you can smoothly transfer your data from Windows computer to Mac or vice versa.

USP: Voltage stabilization
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#9. ivkey

ivkey presents unique design in its external CD drive that works with USB 3.0 high-speed interface. For faster data transmission speed, use this product and achieve a maximum speed of up to 5GBPS. Along with speed, you get stable performance and strong fault tolerance.

Ivkey has unparalleled intelligent burning technology and brand new chip to correct the errors. You can play your audio/visual contents without any log or distortion.

USP: Intelligent burning technology
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10. VicTsing

VicTsing brings a multi-function external CD/DVD drive with which you can watch DVD movies, burn files, music, videos to another CD or DVD. You can also install software and create backup discs etc.

VicTsing offers robust anti-shock and noise-reduction technology. The drive consumes low power, and it can be powered by the USB port; you are not supposed to use any external adapter. Don’t miss its slim and lightweight design, which provides a stylish appearance.

USP: Error-correction ability
Check out on Amazon

That’s all!

Summing up…

For smooth, hassle-free, fast, and secure transmission of your data, external CD/DVD drive is the best solution for your Mac. Note that you can buy any CD or DVD with maximum data storage capacity and then transfer your data from one computer to another.

External Disc Drives For Mac

You may also like to refer:

Mac Disc Drive

Which external CD/DVD drive would you like to buy for your Mac?

Jignesh Padhiyar is the co-founder of iGeeksBlog.com who has a keen eye for news, rumors and all the unusual stuff that happens around Apple products. During his tight schedule, Jignesh finds some moments of respite to share side-splitting contents on social media.

Disc Drive For Imac

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