Traditional DVD drives rule.

Apple may be trying to obsolete the DVD but this user of Netflix-by-mail refuses to. The best catalog by far, with much more choice which does not come and go, unlike its streaming counterpart, is to be had by Netflix mail order.

Unfortunately, to the extent that Apple even includes DVD players with its machines they are invariably of the slot loading variety. I have suffered through no fewer than eight of these on various iBooks, MacBooks and iMacs and fully half have failed. Your choices are to have the slot loading DVD drive replaced at enormous cost or procure a used one on eBay (taking your chances with the high fraud rate there), and using the excellent pictorials at iFixit.com to do it yourself.

It is never easy. I have done it in iMacs and iBooks and you are essentially looking at almost completely gutting the machine to get at the drive. You need mechanical skill, courage, excellent organization and a good deal of luck. Those small parts and connectors you will be removing can be very fragile, which is where the luck comes in.

So when the slot loading drive in my MacMini, used as a DVD movie player, started playing up, I took it to the Apple Geniuses at the local Apple Store only to watch them blast compressed air through the DVD slot and through the ineffectual ventilation holes in the base, and the thing worked again. For a couple of weeks. So I procured my own compressed air and repeated the process with the next four failures over the past ten weeks.

After the fifth time the drive refused to come back to life, and knowing how hard it is to procure and replace, I decided I was through with this compromised design and bought an external one.

The Samsung Ultra-Slim DVD reader/writer.

It’s compact, has a proper extendable disc tray, is far cheaper at $50 than any repair could be, and fits nicely between the Mini and the Airport Express, as you can see above. It comes in a wide range of colors – I opted for white. There’s no power brick, the stated trade off being that it uses two USB sockets to derive sufficient power for operation. With my 2010 MacBook Air and 2009 Mini just inserting the larger of the two USB plugs had it working fine. That’s just as well as the two sockets on the MacBook Air are on opposite sides of the keyboard which would have necessitated a USB extension cable to connect to both sockets. Not all computers deliver sufficient power at their USB sockets, so if one does not work, use two. I was certainly not going to buy the $79 MacBook Air Superdrive which is …. you guessed it, slot loading.

Operation is plug-and-play with a Mac. No software installation is required. The empty tray is opened using a finger touch on the front or the eject key on a keyboard. I find that the eject touch key on Mobile Mouse (used on the iPad as a wireless remote keyboard) works fine too. With a disc loaded, the only way to open the drive is with a keyboard or using the eject icon in the Finder – a push on the front of the drive will not work. A bad DVD or CD which never boots can be removed by pressing in the tray for a few seconds, after which it opens, meaning you don’t have the dreaded situation you get with slot loading drives where a bad CD/DVD can render the drive useless. Sure Apple has start up key sequences which purport to force a jammed disc out, but they don’t always work. Want to guess how I know?

For anyone seeking to watch or burn DVDs for movies or photo backups, this Samsung external drive is recommended. It cannot possibly be any worse than the slot-loading drives Apple provides. The only issue encountered so far is that the unit is so light, I had to place some two sided tape on its rubber feet to stop it shifting when the tray is operated. Further, when running Carbon Copy Cloner to back-up the Mini to a USB-connected and USB-powered external drive, trying to start a DVD in the Samsung while CC was running resulted in nothing happening. The likely cause is simply an overload of the modest aggregate power available at the Mini’s USB sockets. So I simply let CCC run, restarted and all was well. It’s probably not a good idea to run other USB devices, which do not have separate power supplies, while using this DVD player.

Meanwhile, I can add another notch to my belt, testifying to the many failures of Apple’s awful hardware. Can you wonder that both my serious work machines are home grown – and ultra-reliable – Hackintoshes?

Disclosure: Long AAPL 2012 call options.