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Although none of the drives work with Apples free iDVD software, each drive is compatible with Apples 999 DVD Studio Pro 1.5.2. We tested how long it took to burn a movie from DVD Studio Pro by performing a Build And Format of the programs tutorial files.

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But if you dont have the money to upgrade to a new Mac with a built-in SuperDrive, or dont have the option (or inclination) to install one, you can still join the digital revolution by purchasing an external DVD-R drive.

The same Pioneer SuperDrive included in the newest desktop Macs is now available as an external FireWire drive from a variety of companies.

And thanks to a hardware upgrade, this new crop of drives can burn a DVD twice as fast as the previous models could.

The bad news is that youll miss out on some basic functionality: external DVD-R drives cant play commercial DVDs unless your Mac already has a DVD drive built in, and you wont be able to use iDVD, Apples free DVD-authoring software, at all (although some external drives do come with iDVD alternatives).

But if youre willing to live with these compromises, an external DVD-R drive offers an excellent -- and fairly inexpensive -- way to add DVD-burning capabilities to your Mac.

We found that while they all performed almost identically, only two drives, the 379 LaCie and the 399 Formac, included Mac-compatible DVD-authoring software in the box.

Of those two, the LaCie drives great case design and included media edged it into the lead.

The cases hide the devices true color, as well as the headphone jack and the drive activity lights.

The GVPs white case with silver details also features an outer door.

But since there are no buttons on the front, you must flip down the door to access the eject button.

Despite their less hip appearance, we prefer the open-face design of the remaining four drives.

The best case design belongs to the LaCie drive, which not only was the slimmest of the lot, but also was easily stackable.

Speed Burners All the DVD-R drives we tested feature the new Pioneer A05 mechanism.

This model doubles each of the speed ratings for the A04 mechanism used in the most current preinstalled desktop SuperDrives at the time of testing.

Apple should be including the faster A05 mechanism in its desktop systems by the time you read this.) That means the A05 can burn a DVD at 4x, a DVD-RW at 2x, a CD-R at 16x, and a CD-RW at 8x and can read data from a CD at 32x.

Of course, to burn DVDs at these faster speeds, you need properly rated media.

At the time of this testing, 4x DVD-R media was scarce and fairly expensive (averaging about 4 a pop); however, supply should soon catch up with demand.

But before you go out and buy 4x media for all your DVD-R drives, you should note that using this 4x media can be problematic -- if not downright destructive -- on older DVD-R drives.

Even after the update, these drives will burn DVDs at only 1x speed on 4x media.

Burning to DVD To see how the drives compared with each other, we connected each to a dual-1GHz Power Mac G4 (DDR) running OS X 10.2.3 with 512MB of RAM and recorded how long it took the drives to complete common tasks.

We also compared the results with those of the G4s internal Pioneer A04 SuperDrive, the most current model available at the time of testing.

As you might expect from seven nearly identical drives, the performance times were extremely close.

When burning a DVD from a 4.2GB disk image using Apples Disk Copy, times ranged from 26 minutes and 55 seconds for the OWC drive to 28 minutes and 39 seconds for the EZQuest drive.

Although none of the drives work with Apples free iDVD software, each drive is compatible with Apples 999 DVD Studio Pro 1.5.2.

We tested how long it took to burn a movie from DVD Studio Pro by performing a Build And Format of the programs tutorial files.

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