MacBook Pro owners face an eventual failure from their SuperDrive CD/DVD reader-writers. The 2006 batch of MB Pros all shipped with a fouled run of optical drive hardware. User after user complained and found failures in the only device that would load their new applications like Adobe’s Creative Suite or Microsoft’s Office Applications. Read the long and sad tale of failures at the Macintouch Reader Report Forum. Even the new MacBook Pro owners are getting bitten.)

The included device gained some stability in later MB Pro units, so by 2008 you had a better than even chance of having a SuperDrive remain operative within the one-year warranty. But hundreds of thousands of MacBook Pro SuperDrives went out the door with a Mean Time Between Failure  (the old MTBF ranking for professional storage) of well under 20,000 hours. A weak figure at best, and unacceptible for small business or enterprise use.

Replacing these units can be simple, or not too costly. But not both. By simple, I mean the $310 replacement drive from the Apple Store, plus an $85 replacement fee. “It’s pretty much $400,” the Apple Genius Bar tech told me tonight. (Then there’s the tax, but at least there’s no shipping.) That’s a total cost of 40 percent of the price of a new MacBook, and about one-third the cost of the lowest MacBook Pro. But this solution is easy, so long as you can do without your MacBook for a week or more. (This is where having the Apple Pro uplift on AppleCare gets you to the front of the line, I’m told.)Fixing this problem with a solution that’s less costly is well, not easy. But for $160, Other World Computing will sell you a replacement drive to slip inside the MacBook Pro, plus point you at a 20-minute Web-based movie of how to install it yourself. You remove 24 screws, plus jiggle one tricky clip, to expose the drive bay and replace the unit. Yeah, some of the screws are magnetized.

The upside to replacing your own drive for only $170 — aside from not losing the use of your laptop for a week — is that you also expose the hard drive bay, which lets you replace the MacBook Pro’s original 5400 RPM drive with a much faster 7200 RPM unit. This faster hard drive (only about $110 for a drive three times larger) is just about the only way to improve the performance of a certain vintage of MacBook Pro: the 2006 units which don’t accept more than 2GB of memory.

None of these internal replacement SuperDrives comes close to what you gain from an external DVD/CD Superdrive. The Sony DRX 840U is a dual-layer CD/DVD writer and reader, 20X speed. I use it with my MacBook Pro, whose original equipment SuperDrive died off after less than two years. The 840U costs about $95 at Amazon, and runs whisper quiet. Its only flaw so far is an inability to eject media using the MacBook Pro’s eject key.

But unless you’re a big fan of using your laptop on flights to watch movies, the need for an internal DVD drive is rare at best. Apple made a poor design choice with these Superdrives that accept disks slipped inside, rather than use a tray, like in most DVD players. All in the name of cost and weight, perhaps, but you pay the extra as an owner to replace this flaky hardware. By all means, don’t buy a used MacBook Pro without anticipating a SuperDrive replacement in your ownership future.