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5 Comments on “External USB 8X DVD +/-RW Dual Layer Burner for PC or Laptop”

1. Captain
   August 31st, 2010 at 1:47 pm

   I bought this external optical drive for my new Asus 1000h based on the well written and convincing reviews here, and even though the Targus at twice the price is always promoted along with the Asus and Acer netbooks. (My Asus rocks by the way) Just like the other reviews say, I plugged in the power cord (runs off of 1 usb) and the data cord (another of the 3 Asus usb’s) and the Asus recognized it immediately and I began downloading software cd’s for my new Canon dslr. Then I watched a movie dvd. That was it. Didn’t need the driver cd. Also comes with a LG DVD Writer Solution DVD if you need/want it. I’m pretty picky, and this unit exceeded my expectations. It’s perfect. And thanks to the previous reviewers, you were spot on and saved me almost $100.
   Rating: 5 / 5

2. Chimp Chimperson
   August 31st, 2010 at 4:20 pm

   I bought this to use with my Asus 904ha netbook. It works great! It is plug and play with XP, just as the other reviewers said. It’s thin and light for easy travel. Powered off of your USB, which is very cool. It burns and plays CDs and DVDs just fine. And it was super cheap, too!

   I have also used it on other computers running on Vista. It worked fine on those as well.

   The directions included are pretty much incomprehensible (very poorly translated…in fact it was kind of comical) But, that didn’t matter, since it worked as soon as I plugged it in. And it also included a disc with drivers. Again, it wasn’t needed.

   I’d recommend this product. In fact, I might even buy another.

   Rating: 5 / 5

3. John P. Toscano
   August 31st, 2010 at 6:44 pm

   I bought this external DVD player/burner drive for my Asus Eee PC-1000HE netbook conmputer, which has no built-in optical drive. Although I don’t expect to use it heavily, it has already proved its worth by making it incredibly simple to replace the hard drive in the netbook with a SSD drive. With the Asus recovery disc in the drive and a blank SSD, the netbook booted from the DVD drive, and the recovery disk did all the rest of the work in transforming the empty SSD to a fully-configured and bootable hard drive.

   The drive has had no trouble reading any CD or DVD disc that I’ve put in it, as long as I plug in BOTH of the USB cables — one for data, and the other to provide additional +5 volt power. As far as burning goes, so far I have only tried one burn of a DVD+R/DL disc, and was a little surprised. The discs say that they are 8x but Nero refused to burn at anything other than 2.4x speed. And the burn failed the rescan test. So then I put another of these blank discs into the Sony DVD drive on my desktop PC, and got the same results! As it turns out, the bargain discs I had bought (not from Amazon) were really only rated as 2.4x and they are apparently a lower quality than I had thought, in spite of the markings on the external packaging. So, I guess I can’t blame this external DVD drive for the burn failure, it seems to be a problem with my cheap media. I will eventually get around to testing it with better blank discs, but I’m betting it will work out okay.

   The drive itself it incredibly tiny, not much bigger than a couple of CD jewel cases stacked together! Along with the diminutive size comes very low weight. These are good attributes to have in a DVD drive to be used on a netbook computer. The case is fairly thin metal, so you don’t want to press down on the top of the drive very hard when opening or closing the door, with a little care it should last a long time.

   It is a real plus that you don’t need any batteries or AC adapter to run this drive, just two USB ports on your computer so the second connection can be made to provide extra power. Some computers might put out enough current through each USB socket that you could get by with using only one port, but probably not in a laptop. If you find the use of two USB ports to be a problem, you can find small AC adapters that convert wall current to 2 to 4 USB power-only ports, and could use one of those to provide the extra 5 volt current if you are short on USB ports.

   I used mine on a Windows XP system, and did not have to use any drivers of any sort to make it be recognized. In fact, as already noted, the eee PC 1000HE was able to boot from the DVD drive at a time when there was no operating system at all installed in the netbook computer, just a completely blank Solid State Disk drive, so I find it hard to believe that other OS’s like Vista could not operate this device easily as at least one review has stated, but while I had zero difficulty, YMMV (and I have not tried Vista myself).

   Highly recommended.
   Rating: 5 / 5

4. jelarv
   August 31st, 2010 at 8:16 pm

   I purchased this based on the positive feedback at Amazon.com, but it worked irratically with my laptop which is only one week old and running Vista. The device wasn’t plug-and-play. Instead I needed to have the driver disk in the drive when plugging it in and then Vista had to find the drive and install it. About 50% of the time the computer recognized the drive and about 50% it didn’t, which required reboots until it recognized it. Unfortunately the product documentation is almost non-existant (a 3×4 one-sided index card) and there’s no reference to a website for help. The disk door didn’t close smoothly and needed a bit of a push which suggested to me poor workmanship or materials.
   Rating: 2 / 5

5. TechnicalDude
   August 31st, 2010 at 8:29 pm

   The drive would not play DVDs on my Acer Aspire One as it said Codecs were needed. I looked around the internet and after reading several tech support boards, downloaded K-lite Mega Codecs and was able to get the drive to operate. It came with some foreign-titled software (??) that I did not use. Windows XP did recognize the drive, but without downloading the needed Codecs, the drive would not have worked for playing DVDs.

   It is VERY slow when writing to DVD. Much slower than the claimed 8X speed.
   Rating: 3 / 5