Even though my laptop has an internal DVD burner I needed another because the internal one could not reliably burn dual layer discs.
I could have just bought any USB-based burner but I asked around and the general consensus was that the best you can get is the Pioneer DVR-112 (an IDE burner). I did some further investigation and it turned out that DVR-212 is the same drive with SATA interface
The bonus is that (in Denmark) DVR-212 was around €15 cheaper than DVR-112.
I looked around for an external SATA to USB enclosure but that was not easy to find.
Even if it is not a really pretty solution I decided to turn to my friends at Dealextreme and ordered sku 10113 which is a combined SATA/IDE to USB converter.
This converter works without any problems with Linux
[166998.280443] usb-storage: device scan complete
[166998.281876] scsi 7:0:0:0: CD-ROM PIONEER DVD-RW DVR-212 1.21 PQ: 0 ANSI: 0
[166998.316839] sr2: scsi3-mmc drive: 40x/40x writer dvd-ram cd/rw xa/form2 cdda tray
[166998.318710] sr 7:0:0:0: Attached scsi CD-ROM sr2
[166998.319301] sr 7:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg2 type 5
That’s it. I used a couple of cable binders to tie the converter to the drive, again not as slick as using an enclosure but it works.