Filed under: Hardware, Odds and ends, Mac 101
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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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Freak Mojo said 11:47AM on 8-10-2009
Great info... so here's one:
How can I tell if my MacBook Pro (late 2008) has the 7200 rpm drive that I upgraded to?
Reply
Tyrannous said 11:57AM on 8-10-2009
Google the hard drive model number from your system profiler
Paul said 11:53AM on 8-10-2009
You know, it's been a long time since I've found one of these Mac 101 tips very useful. I guess I've finally grown up into a 'big boy' Mac user!
Even though these aren't too helpful to me anymore, I can't count the number of times I've emailed the tip to friends or family members that are new to the OS. Thanks for saving me a bunch of time!
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Tyrannous said 11:57AM on 8-10-2009
My optical drive burns and reads at Zero! warranty repair for me
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esporenthead said 12:53PM on 8-10-2009
I put in a CD-ROM from a MacLife magazine to check the burn speed and it did not show up.
Reply
typogrammer said 3:51PM on 8-10-2009
esporenthead: you have to put in some kind of recordable media (such as a CD-R) to find the available write speeds for that kind of disk. Since you're putting in a CD-ROM, you won't see write speeds because you can't write to it.
rowan said 1:18PM on 8-10-2009
+R DL
Also note it's telling you it can write to dual layer disks, something that's easy to miss.
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garybau said 4:29AM on 8-11-2009
to save a key press or two..
click on apple at top left of screen
hold option
system profiler is now the first choice
dynamic menus don't show what you expect until you press the correct button...
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