When I pimped out my five year old PMac G4, I wanted it to do digital video (plenty of RAM and storage) and handle my disc burning duties. I burn a lot of CDs for my self and my students but previously the ISO files were beginning to overwhelm my disk space.

Now I have plenty of space, but I wanted a nice fast burner, preferably one that will handle DVDs as well. I found the HP drive at Best Buy for a decent price ($US110) and it works well under both OS X and Debian PPC. I can burn a 700 MB CD-R in five minutes flat, with verification turned on.

The niftiest thing, though, is the [link|http://www.lightscribe.com/|LightScribe ] capabilities. This lets me print labels right on the discs in the burner. You burn the CD, turn it over and write the label.

The not-so-good news is that you need special discs that cost a bit more, so I'll still be using regular CD-Rs for my one-off, casual stuff.

The drive comes with Windows software and drivers, but OS X saw it right away. To get the LightScribe capability, I had to poke around the Net a bit but I found it. So far Debian doesn't do the LightScribe stuff, but everything else works just fine.

I'm currently labelling some Debian install CDs for my Linux scripting class and they look so nice I can't wait to start up at school and show these off.