If I'm in the wrong place, I apologize. New poster to this area. I've tried to find something on the net, but since Froogle is full of LLM suggested products, here I am. I'm looking for a very simple external CD/DVD capable drive. All I'm planning on using it for is to watch or listen to things, maybe burn some old-school playlist CDs or DVDs. Thank you in advance.
Probably better suited for Other Hardware, but what I'd do is go to CDW (or Best Buy or whatever that would have a large selection), go to the category then pop a model number into Amazon (or your preferred place). PCPartPicker has them too, I believe.
They're all about the same. Don't grab cheapest, don't grab most expensive. Look for the interface you want (Most will likely be USB 2.0, but some USB3 exist).
A search like this:
https://www.cdw.com/category/storage-hard-drives/storage-media/dvd-blu-rays/?w=KF2
Then find the model number of the one you want on Amazon, since CDW is pricier.
They're all about the same. Don't grab cheapest, don't grab most expensive. Look for the interface you want (Most will likely be USB 2.0, but some USB3 exist).
A search like this:
https://www.cdw.com/category/storage-hard-drives/storage-media/dvd-blu-rays/?w=KF2
Then find the model number of the one you want on Amazon, since CDW is pricier.
I needed to pick one up a while back so I could start ripping my DVDs to load up on my Jellyfin server; ended up going with this one.
https://www.amazon.com/LG-SP80NB80-External-writer-Portable/dp/B074ZCMDMK/
Has worked fine.
https://www.amazon.com/LG-SP80NB80-External-writer-Portable/dp/B074ZCMDMK/
Has worked fine.
I have either the same one, or one similar enough to it to be indistinguishable at a glance. Works fine. They're pretty much commodity parts at this point (and have been for more than a decade).
Yeah, as an "old" person, it's still kind of embarrassing how long a DVD drive takes to burn a CD or how long a Bluray takes to make a DVD considering you remember when that was the critical point of these things that kept getting faster every season that went by and often made it sound like your computer was about to explode. (Or you remember games that gave you different cut scenes or features depending upon whether or not you had 1x / 2x / 4x drives.) Now you blow dust off of the drives between uses.
macosandlinux
Ars Tribunus Militum
ROOFULL External CD/DVD Drive
I have one of these, bought it ~2020 and have used it with PC and Mac. I like the padded case too. The USB cable is integrated, which could be could or bad, it tucks away in a channel underneath the unit.
As a middle-age person, I find it amusing is that as a commodity part, DVD and even BR drives have gotten dirt cheap. I remember my first CD burner was like $200, and it had had a caddy, but I burn so many Playstation discs with that thing. I do sort of miss the days of going through stacks of CDs, DVDs, getting the odd coaster when accidentally doing too much with my PC when burning. Thought I was hot shit when I got my first DVD burner...so many Netflix rentals.
Good times with Nero and DVD Shrink.
Now, it doesn't matter. Disc goes burn, can't remember the last coaster that I made. I really need to set up a NAS, but the cost is something I'm not ready for yet.
I also have an LG BR external drive (BP60NB10), and also recommend that, but alas, it's very difficult to get BR movies to play on modern computers and no go for UHD discs. Super easy to flash for ripping those same discs though.
I have one of these, bought it ~2020 and have used it with PC and Mac. I like the padded case too. The USB cable is integrated, which could be could or bad, it tucks away in a channel underneath the unit.
As a middle-age person, I find it amusing is that as a commodity part, DVD and even BR drives have gotten dirt cheap. I remember my first CD burner was like $200, and it had had a caddy, but I burn so many Playstation discs with that thing. I do sort of miss the days of going through stacks of CDs, DVDs, getting the odd coaster when accidentally doing too much with my PC when burning. Thought I was hot shit when I got my first DVD burner...so many Netflix rentals.
Good times with Nero and DVD Shrink.
Now, it doesn't matter. Disc goes burn, can't remember the last coaster that I made. I really need to set up a NAS, but the cost is something I'm not ready for yet.
I also have an LG BR external drive (BP60NB10), and also recommend that, but alas, it's very difficult to get BR movies to play on modern computers and no go for UHD discs. Super easy to flash for ripping those same discs though.
If you have a 24/7 uptime machine at home, just get some big externals and call it a day. NAS's used to be effective when you needed to RAID a bunch of drives to get a "reasonable" capacity, but with the ability to plot 12+TB down and connect a single cable the niche has really shrunk.
I didn't have the money for one of those legends, so I had to settle for the HP CD-writer 9100 8x4x32. It was MOSTLY successful, so long as I didn't do anything to disturb the writing process. I just gave it away last year to a friend as part of a PII-400/440BX system that he's using to play Half-Life the way it was originally released!
Plextor 12Plex SCSI drive CD-ROM (before burners were even remotely affordable) back in 1996, installed in my Cyrix 6x86 custom PC with an Adaptec SCSI card. The drive alone was 250 and the SCSI card probably was 100.
Quote from a PC Week article near release titled "Next-generation CD-ROM drives outpacing content."
Yep, the content industry stalled, we never needed anything past 8X (1200Kbps at edge of the disc where it's fastest) for removable drives.
Why did I go with SCSI just for home use at such expense? Because CD drives are so fucking slow that they actually slowed down an IDE hard drive on the other connector of the cable because the bus has to wait for the drive to respond. This could cause noticeable glitching in things like games when they needed to access the content on a CD. Also at the time SCSI was where the fastest CD drives came out first; IDE versions only came later.
I still have the box. I keep mementos in it.
I bypassed that by replacing my 386's IDE interface with a standalone ISA card that had two separate IDE ports; that way both drives could be addressed simultaneously. When I got my 486 in mid-1998 (it was a hand-me-down) I plugged that same card in so that I could use the motherboard's local bus IDE port for the HDD, and the CD-ROM on the ISA bus since a CD-ROM under DOS didn't need anything approaching local bus bandwidth. Anything newer had two IDE ports on the board, which made sharing a cable a moot point!
Well, I had multiple hard drives at that point (needed space for those 100KB 120x120 porn GIFs), AND I bought a SCSI flatbed scanner. AND I had money I treated as disposable and I was a tech geek and SCSI was way cooler.
Yeah, I just hope I find something that hardcore survivor type nowadays. Thank you for the suggestion.
If you're ever considering using your drive to back up dvd/blu-ray/uhd disks. Check out the information here.
https://forum.makemkv.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=19634
It tends to limit your selection, but increases utility.
https://forum.makemkv.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=19634
It tends to limit your selection, but increases utility.
I'm the OP. I meant for it to mean any drive that's going to fit watching and burning CDs and DVDs. I prefer it not to be blu-ray, but I didn't specify because I've been out of the market for one for decades. For all I know, blu-ray drives may have been all that was available now. I'm getting a lot of help here from everyone. Thank you all!
My anecdotal experience,, and what I've read from others on the Web is they're not all approximately the same in terms of reliability.
My (again anecdotal, for those who want to jump all over me) experience suggests that if you want reliability, buy Panasonic.
My (again anecdotal, for those who want to jump all over me) experience suggests that if you want reliability, buy Panasonic.
Hell yeah! I played the shit out of half life on an overclocked Intel Celeron 300A. Which brought me to ARS.
