Mac 101: How to check the speed of your CD/DVD burner

More Mac 101, tips and tricks for novice users.

Every so often, stumbling around the Mac OS you find something clever and wish everyone knew it. As I was about to do a CD burn on my internal optical drive on my Mac Pro, I was wondering how fast that Apple stock drive was. Yes, I could have checked the specs on the Apple website, but while playing with System Profiler I found something interesting. (To get to System Profiler select the Apple logo at the top left of your screen, choose About This Mac, then click More Info. You can also find it in your Applications/Utilities folder.)

If you select Disc Burning in the left hand column you'll get a list of your internal and external drives. If you put a disc in (new or already burned) the profiler will tell you what write speeds are supported after you 'refresh' the data from the profiler View Menu or just by doing a 'command-R'.


Quite nifty. My Pioneer internal burns a CD at 32x and a DVD at 12x. Who knew? Try it, if you have a use for the info. Maybe I'm easily impressed, but I'm hoping this tip will be useful to some of our readers.
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