Opitcal Drive External Enclosure

Mac
#1

G’day,

In my currently dis-used MacPro5,1 I have a Pioneer BluRay drive.

I would like to keep using it, as I was part way through ripping my DVDs, and now also have some actual BluRays to rip too.

For around $150 I see I could buy a “slim” external BluRay drive… but - I have a drive… I just want an enclosure.

So far, I can find nothing on eBay… Seems this is all that’s out there:

Which costs more than buying a compete slim unit…

At this point I’m considering butchering my Firewire 3.5" dual enclosure to see if it can do the job instead.

Is there anything cheaper out there?

Cheers

cosmic

#2

I may be way off track here. For many previous versions of MacOS, we have been able to access and share the optical drive in one mac from another mac. Could the enclosure you need be the MacPro itself?

#3

Hi Cosmic.

I have one of those drives (also out of my Mac Pro) in one of those cases from OWC. Mine has Firewire 400 & 800 & USB 3. It works well but I rarely use it these days. I bought it about 7 years ago. If you have a look on OWC’s own website they often have stuff like this heavily discounted. Even with the more expensive post it can be much cheaper than Macfixit.

I also have a slim USB with I think a Panasonic drive but I have found it to be a bit flakey whereas the other one is rock solid.

#4

Cosmic,
For occasional use maybe one of these ?

Also will allow PATA & SATA bare HD drives to be connected at USB 3.1 speed.

#5

I have one of those also but I find it a bit unreliable which is unusual for NewerTech stuff. The other stuff of their’s is rock solid but the connections on the drive adapter just seem a bit flakey to me.

#6

@snarl Yes - sharing the optical drive… I think that even goes back to the olden days, very early OS X… I can’t say that I have a lot of luck with it… and if worst comes to worst - I could “short term” probably use the MacPro to do this job. When I was working hard at ripping my DVDs I got through a LOT of them… then got lost a bit when I noticed that Handbrake hadn’t always done a great job at the ripping. But ideally I’d prefer something that doesn’t mean firing up the MacPro “just” to rip a disc.

@richard I’ll check out OWC. MacFixIt sure make some reasonable margins (maybe…) on selling OWC stock.

@JimWOz Ahh - I just saw something like that on eBay. Might be a good solution, and an alternative to my dock, which would be perfect for this except that it’s not wide enough to fit a 5.25" drive.

#7

I don’t mind MacFixit. I always look there first & their postage costs are reasonable. If you subscribe to their news letter they are often sending out discount codes but OWC have a garage sale every month & you can pick up some real bargains if the outrageous postage costs (not OWC’s fault) don’t prohibit that.

Having said that, MacFixit have some cheap stuff now & then too. I got a USB C external case for the NVMe drive I pulled out of my Mac Pro (which is an OWC case) open box for cheaper than OWC last year.

#8

You’ll hate me Cosmic, but an option would be something like this from Australiancomputertraders. You could put it on a wired network port and remote into it to use the burner. One of the problems is all “newer” secondhand PC’s seem to have slim optical drives or none at all.

I have one of the OWC USB3 enclosures. I got it because all the slimline burners seem to be rubbish quality and don’t endure, where the full size drives are much more reliable units.
Not used very often now though…