Mac mini compatible optical drives?

[eharmon]

As is inevitable, I have another failing Mac mini optical drive. In this case, a SuperDrive (Matshita UJ-845-C), so pour one out for one of the nicer ones.

I'm looking for replacements, but before I'm lame and replace it with an identical drive, I was wondering what alternatives exist. Maybe something more reliable, too...

Roughly, it looks like they need to be bezel-less 12.7mm PATA drives.

It looks like OWC sold a replacement at one point that also bumped the specs to 8x write speeds and proper dual-layer support, but it's long been discontinued, and unfortunately doesn't seem to offer the OEM part number to find a generic replacement: https://eshop.macsales.com/item/Panasonic/MMINISL8XDL/

Anyone know if there's any limitation to drive compatibility, or a list of 12.7mm PATA drives anywhere?

Information seems sparse, besides looking at the drives that happened to be used in other systems which used the same form factor.

 

[eharmon]

I got my drive working again (it was a mechanical jam), so I've paused my quest for now, if anyone was waiting to see if I come back with more research.

Though it sounds absolutely terrible so I'm sure it'll be broken again in a few years...

I do see claims that some drives don't "just work" with native burning, despite being used in other models, which is pretty odd. If mine breaks, maybe I'll give a mix-and-match a try, though sadly the OEM parts for each model don't seem to be readily documented.

 

[Chopsticks]

when mine died i just got a drive that had been pulled from an 2007/2008 era imac straight from ebay.. it cost me about $20 australian dollars (roughly $10-15US dollars at the time). Ive had no issues with it, its just a Matshita UJ-875, nothing to special really.

 

[mikes-macs]

I've had great luck for years with my Apple USB SuperDrive. Depending on which Mac mini. Mine is Mac mini (Late 2014) also works on 2009 Mac mini as well. I think it was for the Mac Air IIRC.

 

[eharmon]

when mine died i just got a drive that had been pulled from an 2007/2008 era imac straight from ebay.. it cost me about $20 australian dollars (roughly $10-15US dollars at the time). Ive had no issues with it, its just a Matshita UJ-875, nothing to special really.

That's the one I was eyeballing. No issues with Finder-native burning?

 

[Chopsticks]

it was about two years ago when i replaced my mac mini drivewith the UJ-875 but i dont recall having any issues with native finder burning. usually as a matter of habit if i replace a mac cd/dvd drive I test that out along with iDVD support (or is it DVD player?? i forget).
While i generally prefer to use toast when burning a disc i still make sure to use a apple branded drives or flash the pc equivalent with apple firmware (RPC-1 region free back in the cowboy firmware hacking days of mac OS 10.2 Jaguar).... story for another day there

as long as its apple branded i've never had any issues swapping drives around or replacing dead ones.
its possible there are some specific drives that don't work with certain hardware and/or software configs but ive never encountered that myself.

the mac mini/imac etc used a bunch of different drives from LG, panasonic, pioneer and so forth over the years, even macs of the same model can have drives from different brands depending on what apple could get at the time.

At some point mac OS X gained universal cd/dvd drive support and you no longer needed to worry about if it showed up as 'native' in system profiler, not long after they started to phase out the optical drive on their machines