I've used the Rosewill mentioned in the sig with OS X for ages but only occasionally, as it required me to shut off my computer and plug it in (3 IDE devices on a mobo with one IDE bus and SATA=fail by user). Now that I have a SATA drive hooked up and thus the DVD drive running full-time, I've noticed an issue or two I suspect is due to OS X.
Namely, some DVDs conjure a "disk cannot be read" error, some don't. When this error occurs it's usually accompanied by the drive spinning up and down repeatedly until I get it to eject (which can take a few tries). If it recognizes the disc, I have no trouble ejecting it. However, SOME of the discs that it can recognize (again, namely DVDs, I have seen no problems with CDs as of yet) have read issues and can trip up DVD Player into "skipping damaged areas". To make matters even weirder, if the drive is inactive for awhile OS X suddenly can't read the disc and I have to eject and reload to get it sorted. This can happen with nearly any disc, DVD or CD.
It sounds like a hardware problem. However, the kicker is, there's no problems in Windows with the same discs that are "unreadable". And install discs OS X can't recognize boot easy as pie.
This leads me to suspect I've got an OS issue on my hands. I'm guessing it's a southbridge kext bug (SB700). Has anyone else had something odd like this with their optical drive? What's going on here, folks?
(Thanks in advance to any advice offered)