CharisMac Engineering is now shipping new Firewire enclosures for legacy Sony USB CD-RWs. The enclosures allow users the ability to burn CDs through OS X. In addition to the OS X support for the drives, the drives now feature the bonus of increased burning efficiency. According to Charismac Engineering:
CharisMac Engineering, Inc., manufacturer of CD / DVD mastering software Discribe, announced the availability of a high-performance, low-cost Firewire enclosure via their online Web store today. The enclosure was primarily sourced by CharisMac to address the thousands of legacy Sony USB CD-RW users who have been left behind by OS X.
The increased popularity of Appleis latest operating system, OS X, has left many USB CD-RW owners with paper weights. The new operating system does not offer a driver for the USB bridge chips located in the Sony enclosures as well as in the enclosures of USB drives offered by other companies. By removing the ATAPI drive from the USB enclosure and adding the drive into a Firewire enclosure, users are able to once again add life to their one time bleeding edge drives. The entire process can be completed in a matter of a few minutes.
And added benefit is that the drives will actually run more efficiently in the Firewire enclosures. The USB interface was originally designed for devices such as keyboards, printers and computer mice. In some instances 8x and higher drive mechanisms are located inside USB enclosures. USB is limited to 4x for burning data, and typically burns audio at 2x. By placing the drive mechanism in the Firewire enclosure users can take full advantage of the speeds of the internal mechanisms.
You can find more information about the Firewire enclosures at the CharisMac Web site. The Firewire enclosures are available for US$99.95.