can anyone recommend a good external DVDRW drive?

the superdrive in my old macbook pro isn't working so good anymore, it won't work with toast at all anymore. does anyone have a good recommendation of a good external DVDRW drive that will work with my macbook?

Oh yes Michelle - Pioneer! Readily available from Pioneer outlets wherever you may be, or from OWC Find the latest Performance Upgrades, Firewire and USB Hard Drives, SATA, Memory, Laptop Battery, and more at OWC. The latest models are the 116D (ATA) and the 216D (SATA). Put one in a firewire enclosure eg. Mercury, or Wiebetech or G-Tech which has the Oxford chipset. They're not the cheapest but arguably the best.

Another vote for Pioneer and as hughevan states, firewire is the go. Also look at getting a DL burner as you will be able to make a copy of your Leopard disc for maintenance purposes etc.

Harry - I have a Pioneer 112D and a 115D now (D for Dual Layer), both in 2-hand firewire enclosures, daisy-chained, the later one burns modern disk media at a higher speed. The setup works very smoothly.

cool thanks, I will get the 116d or the 216d with a firewire case. what is the difference between ata and sata?

Short answer, SATA is faster. Make sure your "old Macbook Pro" (how old?) is SATA compatible. The best source of information about any Mac is Mactracker, a free utility.

If you're looking for a good external DVD drive I would recommend the LG Lightscribe drive. It uses two USB ports or just one depending on what you're doing and it has lightscribe. It's carried by Best Buy, here's the link:

LG - 8x External USB 2.0 Double-Layer DVD±RW/CD-RW Drive - GP08LU10

I had a generic I/O media DVDRW USB drive. It never said mac compatable, but roxio detected it and worked great with no issues. I'm eager to try a blu ray copier, but none of my friends have an external ones yet.