External optical drive

Hello all,

I'm a little new to OSX, so could someone explain to me how OSX handles external optical drives?

From what I understand, not all external optical drives have a system profile. If it does not, the external optical has limited functionality. Most notably, it seems that any write/burn functions are not available natively - only through some applications (like Toast). Most read functions seem to function normally, however.

Am I correct so far? Please give any additional details.

Anyways, the main question I have is if I remove the internal super-drive and put in a SATA-USB enclosure, will I retain full super-drive functionality? From what I can tell, it will have a system profile and thus, it should.

I would like to add a solid state disk to my 2009 iMac - and the only way to do that without replacing the regular hard drive is through the optical drive's SATA port. So I'll be out of an optical drive. I was planning on using an external bluray I had (ASUS SBR-02E1S-U), but during my testing I quickly realized that the drive's functionality was limited to read functions.

So hopefully a SATA-USB enclosure for the SuperDrive will still have full functionality
The other option would be to see if there was some way to add write functionality back into the external. PatchBurn seemed to do this in earlier versions of MacOSX, but its a bit outdated.

Do I have any other options?

Thanks for the help.