mark++

Hopefully this will save somebody a headache.

This evening I was looking at System Profiler and I discovered that my MacBook’s SuperDrive didn’t appear quite as super as the one in my wife’s MacBook. Specifically, my drive reported 0KB cache, and a greatly reduced set of supported DVD formats.

Turns out that this was because I was running Parallels.

Here are the details from System Profiler:

Normal

MATSHITA DVD-R UJ-857D:

Firmware Revision: KBVB
Interconnect: ATAPI
Burn Support: Yes (Apple Shipped/Supported)
Cache: 2048 KB
Reads DVD: Yes
CD-Write: -R, -RW
DVD-Write: -R, -RW, +R, +RW, +R DL
Burn Underrun Protection CD: Yes
Burn Underrun Protection DVD: Yes
Write Strategies: CD-TAO, CD-SAO, DVD-DAO
Media: No

After launching Parallels

MATSHITA DVD-R UJ-857D:

Firmware Revision: KBVB
Interconnect: ATAPI
Burn Support: Yes (Apple Shipped/Supported)
Cache: 0 KB
Reads DVD: Yes
CD-Write: -R, -RW
DVD-Write: -R, -RW
Burn Underrun Protection CD: Yes
Burn Underrun Protection DVD: Yes
Write Strategies: CD-TAO, CD-SAO, DVD-DAO
Media: No