Why DVD toasters don't work on your new Mac - and how to fix it

TidBITS Talk
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Sometimes you just have to archive data in a form that is immutable, and a CDROM is perfect for that. All looked well - add drive, see burn folder show up in Finder, add data, select ‘burn to disk’. New Macbook M4 Pro - surely that would be a breeze.

Except that none of it worked. The USB drive I had was recognised, but as soon as I inserted a target CD the drive would disappear in Finder and the Mac (on Tahoe 26.2) would pretend the drive no longer even existed. A commercial movie DVD would start up after 30 seconds of making ticking sounds. So, I bought one of a more known brand (ASUS Zendisk) which has its own USB-C cable.

Which didn’t work either. And neither on the Macbook Air M4 I had from work. But on a Linux box I quickly built both drives worked fine. Ergo, the problem was the Macbook, and by the way the drive misbehaved (by ticking) it felt like a power issue.

I hooked up a USB-C hub to a USB-C power supply and connected Mac and DVD toaster so that the toaster would be powered from the hub instead of the Macbook, and presto, all worked as advertised.

Conclusion: if you want to use an external DVD writer with a modern Macbook, use a powered hub.

After a chat with Apple support it emerged that the USB-C ports of a Macbook are good for about 900mA. Using a USB power meter I measured a drive startup peak current of 1.1A, which would cause the USB-C current controller in the Macbook to indeed disconnect and try again later - ergo the ticking sound. QED..

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A standard USB 3 port’s power limit is 900 mA, unless the device uses the PowerDelivery API to request more.

Apple’s no-longer-sold SuperDrive requires more, but it uses a proprietary mechanism to request and get it. But that protocol works with my M4 mini (directly connected using a USB A-C adapter).

A bus-powered drive really shouldn’t try to draw more than 900 mA, because there’s no guarantee that it can be supplied.

But I wonder if the Macbook was even providing that much. I’ve seen (other) laptop computers, where the USB ports don’t provide maximum power when the computer is running from battery, but only when connected to a power adapter.

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Alternatively, one can a DVD burner/reader that’s powered off of a wall socket, as opposed to running off USB.

Admittedly, this isn’t an optimal solution for on-the-go disc burning/reading. But for desktop Macs, it’s nice to know the drive has the power it needs — even if you’re calling on it to burn an MDISC Blu-Ray.

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As it happens I just purchased a second Tekera powered hub. The first I bought a few years ago for my LG monitor USB port (the monitor connects to, and powers, my M2 MBA with USB-c) so I could connect a Bluray drive, an SSD and various devices.

The second one is for my legacy 2017 iMac that was having difficulty powering several USB devices and, in any case, it was awkward to connect devices to the ports on the back.

The MBA is currently running Sequoia and reading/writing Bluray disks is working. From the above discussion, I wonder if Tahoe will cause problems?

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As far as I can tell you’ll be fine, provided a hub with enough power supplies the external drive and not the MBA. Once the power issue was addressed I was even able to use the basic disk creation facilities in Finder - as a matter of fact, those then showed up automatically.

That said, I have no idea if Bluray demands more power as my needs never exceeded the 4.7GB space of a single sided DVD, let alone its DL cousin. The ASUS Zendrive V1M I use is M-DISC capable and those demand a bit more oompf as well due to the different materials used (hence the reduced writing speed), but I have no power measurements for it. They’re a tad on the pricey side to experiment with as they’re marketed as capable of outlasting the heat death of the Universe :wink:.

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It is worth noting that the Library of Congress tests every known form of electronic storage each year and always comes to the conclusion that nothing, really, is immutable, unfortunately. The most archival is LTO tape. I was surprised to learn this. Everything will fail, as most of know, so best practices are having at least two, preferably three, copies. I rely on hard drives and SSDs, but to each their own. I come to this as a professional photographer and video person, so losing my data (and I have a lot of it) would impact my ability to make a living, but that in no way negates how important is for anyone.

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Looked up M-disc, which I’d never heard of. But then I found this February 1 2026 article on 2026-02-10T06:00:00Z – 4 days before my post – saying “You shouldn’t buy them today.”

Link to HowToGeek, a site I’ve used before

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I have a couple of boxes of M discs here somewhere. But I never got around to using them. Aside from capacity, it seemed fairly obvious to me that the devices needed to read the discs would probaby vanish much faster than the discs would “rot”.

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I think that last paragraph is wrong.

M-Discs are designed so they can be read by standard DVD/BD optical drives. You only need a special M-Disc drive to write to the media.

But I agree with their other points - the cost for high capacity storage is too high, compared to HDD and SSD mass-storage devices.

Regarding drive availability, it seems that there are more M-Disc compatible burners available now than when the tech was popular. Of course, there is the fear that optical media altogether may go away, but that has nothing to do with M-Disc.

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@Shamino:

M-Discs are designed so they can be read by standard DVD/BD optical drives. You only need a special M-Disc drive to write to the media.

Yes, that is correct, and it is why M-Discs (or equivalent Blu-ray discs with a Metal Ablative Recording Layer (MABL)) are a solid choice for long term archival storage.

From the article:

Relying on an M-Disc means betting that you will be able to find a working optical drive and a compatible connection interface (like USB-A) thirty or forty years from now.

The concern that optical disc readers will go away any time soon is, I think, misguided. New movies are still being released on Blu-ray. Moreover, you can still buy 3.5” floppy disk drives! See: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=usb+floppy+drive (but I’m not sure if they make floppy disk drives compatible with Macs). They also still manufacture 3.5” floppy disks (with a whopping 1.44MB capacity each!). … And if you were really concerned about the inability to get a working optical drive, you could always buy an extra external USB Blu-ray reader to store with the backup discs.

@Shamino:

But I agree with their other points - the cost for high capacity storage is too high, compared to HDD and SSD mass-storage devices.

I think the concern about costs misses the point. The purpose of archiving important data to optical discs is not because it is the most cost effective option, but rather because it is the most reliable and safest archival option, while still being reasonably affordable unless you’re backing up a massive library of videos or the like, in which case it would probably make sense to prioritize and only use optical discs for the truly important/priceless files. (But if you make a lot of family videos in 4K, then that would definitely present a challenge.)

Our family currently creates less than 100GB of new photos/videos per year. So every year, I can create an archive of the previous year’s family photos/videos by burning them to an M-DISC (in standard file formats–.jpg, .heic, .hevc, .mp4, etc.). I bought two 5-packs of 100GB M-DISCs (Verbatim from Amazon) for $58.90 per 5-pack three months ago (price is now $74.95 for a 5-pack). So my cost works out to about $10-$15/yr. (i.e., a one-time cost each year of $10-$15 to create a new permanent archival backup).

Obviously, the per GB cost is a lot higher than the per GB cost of a HDD or an SSD, and at current prices for Backblaze B2 cloud storage, one 100GB M-DISC costs the same as 24.5 years of storage with Backblaze (assuming they don’t raise their prices). But the point is that I can create archival backups of my most important files (primarily our family photos) that are very likely to survive for decades, are beyond the reach of malware/hackers, and won’t get lost if the backup service goes out of business or if my spouse/kids/kids’ guardians fail to pay storage bill after I die (or become incapacitated) or are unable to login for some reason.

I think people tend to underappreciate the risks of their own deaths. In both personal and professional capacities, I’ve had to deal with situations where a loved one died and those left behind did not know how to access important files–either not knowing where they were stored or not knowing the necessary passwords. … For example, if parents with young children die, in the chaos and heartbreak than ensues, it would be very easy for the guardians of the young children to not know how to access the digital photo library if it is stored/backed up to the cloud or to inadvertently allow the subscription to lapse, with the result being that the file would be deleted by the provider. Having a local backup on a hard drive would help, of course, but hard drives are more likely to fail (or experience bit rot) than M-DISCs. (I’ve had a lot more hard drive failures than optical disc failures over the past 25 years, even with low quailty CDs/DVDs.) [Pro Tip: Take some time now to prepare for your own unexpected death–not just by having a Will, but by making sure your heirs/guardians of your children will have the information they need to access your accounts and your digital files.]

By burning annual archives of our family photo library to M-DISCs, when I die (or become incapacitated), there is very little risk that my spouse/kids would not be able to access our family’s photo collection. All they (or their guardians, since they are currently minors) would have to do is find the box of Blu-ray discs and read the piece of paper that explains the discs contain a backup of our family photo collection and that the photos can be copied to a computer that has a Blu-ray drive (such as my computer). As far as I am concerned that is worth the cost of about $1/mo.

@kat634e @scstr

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Joe Kissell at Take Control Books has just published a new edition of ‘Take Control of Your Digital Legacy’ that goes into this in some detail.

A substantial discount is available to Tidbits members.

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Long term, though, things stored digitally are to my mind more likely to vanish (due to technology change, etc.) than the containers of actual photos and documents that my parents and earlier generations had.

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@kat634e:

Long term, though, things stored digitally are to my mind more likely to vanish (due to technology change, etc.) than the containers of actual photos and documents that my parents and earlier generations had.

I partially agree. On the one hand, until the material physically degrades, the printed photos in old family photo albums will outlast any technology changes, and paper can survive well for a very, very long time. I have some ancient B&W photos of ancestors that died a century ago. And that is one reason why we also make annual family photo albums of printed photos. (The experience of sitting down with an old photo album and flipping through it also feels different than swiping through photos on an iPad/iPhone.) … Of course, printing the literally thousands of photos we take in a year would not be feasible (or desirable), and it takes a lot of work to sort through and find the “best” ones. (There was something to be said to being limited to a roll of 24 or 36 photos at a time and having to pay to develop them. It made you compose and shoot more carefully.)

On the other hand, I’m also left with my parents’ old family photo albums and having to figure out what to do with them. I really wish I had them in digital form, which would be higher quality than could be produced by scanning the 4x6 prints (they didn’t save negatives), and would allow them to be shared with my siblings and my kids. Removing the photos from the albums and scanning them to share with my siblings will take more time than I have to devote to the project at at this point, and I’m too risk averse to ship off the only copies of the photos to a photo scanning services. No amount of shipping insurance would cover the loss if USPS/FedEx/UPS lost the photos. But at the same time, if my house burns down, there are no backups of the photos from my childhood.

So I guess I would say my view is that printed photos are the safest longterm archival format, but compared to digital photos they have less utility (a lot harder to share, harder to get high quality large prints unless you save the negatives–which don’t exist any more!) and take up lot more physical space.

Maybe the best option is: (1) burn copies to M-DISCs, (2) save copies in some other format offsite or in the cloud, and (3) print copies of the best photos as traditional printed photos (probably one set for yourself and each of your kids, if applicable and they would want them). :slight_smile:

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Not necessarily. I’ve got a framed print of my mom and myself when I was a baby and it’s in a display case. I only just recently noticed that apparently it gets a beam of sunlight for a short period each day that has faded the print almost to invisibility. Of course, it’s my only copy and there is no negative. :worried:

I turned it around for now to protect it, but I may try scanning it and seeing if I can Photoshop it back into some life.

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I hear you. I have a box of photos and documents that I have to ship off to a cousin, because some of her kids would be interested in it. If it stays with me, it’ll be trashed for sure. My dad did the same thing as your parents did with some of the photos he shot: threw out the negatives and kept only the prints. I urged him to never do that again.

My brother’s in-laws sent me a ton of images after he died early in 2022 (the Omicron surge). Hundreds of mostly Kodachrome slides of his trips to the western US from the 1980s. I thought about having Dijifi scan them, since they are in Greenpoint and I could take them out there myself, but I wound up doing it myself when a pet-sitting client had to go away for two months. I set up an MBP and a film scanner at that location and it basically became a day job for that 8 week stretch.

I don’t recommend doing this oneself under normal circumstances, because it is enormously time-consuming, has (for me, anyway) a seemingly never-ending learning curve, and requires a lot of careful organization, as well as tedious hours of image cleanup. What I will do with all these images, I don’t know. Maybe set up some sort of web gallery.

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Many local camera shops offer digitization services, so you don’t necessarily have to worry about shipping irreplaceable materials. You may also be able to find high volume photo scanning services nearby. They’re not particularly cheap, but if budgeting is an issue, you may be able to prioritize your photos so that at least you can get the most important ones done first.

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Just want to add before handing over high value or irreplaceable items to a camera shop for digitization, I think it’s a good idea to ask if the shop does the work in-house or through an offsite third party.

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I had a scanner that was up to the job, until Apple pulled Firewire support. Now going through even deeper levels of Hell, trying to get Sequoia reinstalled…

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When it comes to family photos (or even a professional life’s work), you need to be an absolutely ruthless editor. Yes, you can use the latest archival methods, M-Disk or whatever but the question is are your children or colleagues really going to spend the time to go through thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of images to find the good ones? No, they aren’t.

If you’re still working, or happily documenting what you see in daily life, hell, yes, back up all that stuff in three places. But when you’re surveying the past with a view to what your family will enjoy 50 years from now paper and ink are best. There are beautiful things in paper and ink that are still here 500 or more years later. Want to take bets on whether that’s true with your jpegs 500 years hence?

The solution, thanks to modern technology (!), is to make books. You’ll find when you look at the, even though astonishingly cheap, cost of producing a thirty page book of your best memories that all of a sudden that one image of you, face hidden, reading a comic may not deserve inclusion because it adds another page which costs bucks particularly when sending to five family members. And you will find that holding that book is a wildly different sensation than riffling through 376 images on your smartphone.

Maybe do a book a year?

Dave

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Re: hard copies of digital images. What are the best practices for inks and papers? And do consumer-focused book printers, such as Shutterfly, offer archival-quality products?