external dvd/rw drives?

I have a baseline 1st gen. macbook and my harddrive is starting to fill up. The free space is mainly taken up by movies that could easily fit onto several double-layer disks. However, I have no superdrive. I am very tempted to buy a new 160gb internal drive off newegg, however I don't have my mac osX CD's anymore and I guess their model specific which really stinks because we have a 1st gen. intel imac at home too.... But anyways, I was wondering if any other company aside from Lacie is supported as far as external DVD burning drives go. I didn't see any other companies products when I did a search on Apple's support site. I don't really want to shell out $180 for a lacie external dvd burner when they are as cheap as $60 on newegg.

I would opt for an external hdd but I read too many comments from people about them crashing and loosing all their data within 1 year of ownership.

Thanks

I bought an LG E-10L external drive -it's USB2 rather than Firewire.

It works fine with my MacBook.

I've always gone for 3rd party cd or dvd writers
Generally, the actual (IDE) drive is compatible
For external drives, the most important thing is the chipset in the IDE to Firewire/USB bridge. Provided that's compatible with OSX you'll be fine.
But probably the most important compatibility is not whether the OS is compatible but whether the software you're using to burn the DVDs is.

Buy THIS and put it in THIS. I bought 2, they work great. About $100 for the whole thing, including shipping.

Avoid Lacie at ALL costs these days...