Best External DVD Drives
The Dell External USB Slim DVD R/W Optical Drive is a plug and play disc burning and disc playing solution that you can use with a USB port. Simply plug the low profile (14mm), lightweight (200g) drive into your Ultrabook or notebook's USB port and you'll be ready to play or burn your favorite DVD or CD.
Reviews
Find Best Price at Amazon"Review Updated 19 Dec. 2016. I like the Dell DW316 External USB DVD+-RW drive. It is perfect for laptops or any computer without a working internal optical drive. It is a nicer than average USB 2.0 DVD+-RW drive in an above average package.The DW316 comes with Cyber Link Media Suite to facilitate reading/burning CD/DVD media and playing DVD movies on PC's (A nice add-on). As an optical drive for ultrabooks or tablets it's not a lot more to carry wither in weight or bulk. My use of the DW316 is mostly with servers or desktop computers that have no optical drives like the Intel NUC."
"My middle school age kids were able to get it to work right out of the box with no problems."
"My new Lenovo laptop has no internal disk drive, so I needed this to install my old software (i.e., MS Office and Photoshop)."
"Great product and cost competitive."
"Light weight and compact."
"Tried reading a CD that failed on a previously purchased product (Version Tech) and it worked great."
"This is a great addition to my laptop as my new one doesn’t have an internal optical drive."
"Just what I needed for my computer."
Color: Black. Max 8x DVDR Write Speed.
Reviews
Find Best Price at Amazon"[Update 12/1/16] I can verify this works with the Surface Pro 4, and Windows 10 with no problems."
"I opened the box, plugged it into a USB 3.0 port (and no, this drive is USB 2.0, but DVD/CD drives just aren't fast enough to ever need USB 3.0) on my MacBook Pro, and I was good to go."
"I am not very computer savvy and I needed an external DVD because the new laptop did not come with one - my fault - I thought all laptops came with a DVD player."
"VLC media player works great and it's free open source software that plays DVD movies from the external player. I was tempted to rate player 4 stars because LG's customer service isn't conducive to folks on the West Coast and the Quick Set-up Guide doesn't seem to acknowledge that the user may need to install more software than the writer software that's included."
"It fits in nicely beside the drive in the carry case that I purchased to protect the drive when not in use."
"As many new PCs do not come with a DVD writer, but yet still need backup and rescue disks made, this is good insurance."
"This is a great working product, at first I had trouble and blamed it on the DDVR and was going to return but after talking to a friend it was my Video Player program."
"still working 8 months later with regular use - added to a desktop that the disc reader died - the case could be sturdier - use caution handling."
The Archgon Premium External DVD Super Multi Drive clads in a durable aluminum casing and contains a high performance DVD drive. Enter your model number to make sure this fits.
Reviews
Find Best Price at Amazon"The product reminds me of the PC-laptop style DVD drives, the way you insert a CD etc, with a mac look as it has an aluminum outer shell. The drive works instantly as you plug it in, OS X mountain lion recognized it immediately, and I have used it to read and write CDs and DVDs."
"I have to say I was very impressed with this DVD Rom Drive; you just put a blank DVD in, Apple shows it as a blank disk, you put your files on it, then click burn."
"Ordinarily you eject from the desktop, the button on the front only works if there is no disk in (or before it registers the disk)."
"this is obviously a very good item as the many reviews show. a disc must be manually inserted by pushing a button on the unit. Eject through iTunes or the icon that will show on desktop and finder when in use; the keyboard function will NOT eject a disc."
"The drive on the iMac was still covered for repair, but I found through research, that many people had problems with the built-in drive's vertical set-up, so I chose to replace it. I highly recommend this drive for use in conjunction with the newer iMacs that don't have a built-in dvd drive and with older iMacs, as an inexpensive way to replace a malfunctioning dvd drive."
"I'm using MacBook Air."
"This drive is way better than the iMac built-in drive that it replaced."
"Excellent quality and about half the price of the Apple product which also had very poor reviews."
Best External CD Drives
Pure-copper-knitted-net tech leads to smaller resistance, stronger shielding capability, more stable data transmission. USB 3.0 DVD dirver is a perfect companion for computers without the internal drive. High speed: Adopted unique intelligent burning technology, this CD-RW combo drive supported DVD+R, DVD-R, CD-ROM, DVD-ROM, CD-R, CD-RW.
Reviews
Find Best Price at Amazon"No drivers or additional software is needed to run this, so it is just “plug and play”. This DVD Drive also supports USB 3.0 data speed which makes it far superior to read and write with compared to other DVD drives in this price range."
"Sometimes, my wife wants to borrow some DVD to watch and her and my laptops have no DVD drivers."
"This external DVD burner is exactly what I needed…. This DVD/CD burner is small and light weighted, the cord you can see in the picture can put back at the bottom when not in use."
"Connected to the computer can be used directly."
"My car can only play CD, I need to use it to burn CD."
"This external CD drive is very useful."
"When I don’t have this external CD drive, I must go to computer center in the campus because my Macbook Pro doesn't have a CD drive."
"Good things, easy to use up, no CD-ROM, with this, very convenient!"
Best External Blu-ray Drives
This drive is one of the slimmest smallest Blu ray external drives on the market. Enter your model number to make sure this fits.
Reviews
Find Best Price at Amazon"I ordered this Blu-ray burner to replace a LG burner which is picky with its food. Also USB 3.0 supports a larger packet size than USB 2.0, which means less CPU power is wasted on data transferring. It also comes with an optional utility that can be downloaded from the official website: http://www.pioneerelectronics.com/PUSA/Computer/Computer+Drives/BDR-XD05B?tab=firmware. The utility can be used to adjust its internal error recovery and acoustic management settings, which is extremely useful for backing up discs. The error recovery feature can be disabled (a.k.a. This drive have acoustic management (a.k.a."
"After spending the last several hours getting this pioneer blue ray player to work on my laptop, there is the information I wish I had known before buying it: - Buying this blue ray player alone, does NOT appear to allow you to play blue rays on your laptop. - Just the act of plugging the drive in to your laptop alone, does not appear to allow you to watch the disc at all. - This drive comes with a CD for Media Suite 10 software, which includes PowerDVD 10 software. - After installing this, having difficulty, then researching errors online, it does not appear that PowerDVD 10 actually plays blue rays. - Sales prompts for PowerDVD 15 kept coming up when using PowerDVD 10, and it looks like v15 does indeed play Blue Rays."
"I would give it a 5-star rating but I have had to re-install the software it came with twice now, every month or so it will stop playing disks until I wipe Power DVD and re-install."
"I am surprised at how well the drive works; it is quieter than the blogger/reviewers led me to believe."
"I loved it very quick detection & burning capabilities small at size with USB3.0 it takes about 30min to burn a 25Go Blue ray data with seems very correct."
Best External Disc Duplicators
Capacity: 1 to 11 |. Style: M-DISC Support Equipped. A complete standalone DVD Duplicator with a 128mb buffer speed and the latest 24X burners.
Reviews
Find Best Price at Amazon"After my Glyph 1x1 unit quit after almost 9 years of heavy CD copying I thought all units were equal when I went to buy another boy was I wrong, I first bought a unit that I had no idea there was no editing feature in the unit I figured all units offered that apparently this one didn't and there was no warning by the manufacturer or seller. When I got this Produplicator unit there is a reason it is called that because it is a heavy duty unit that is very well built and it cut through the CD's the Copystars unit had problems like a knife through butter."
"My husband used it a few times for mass cd production."
"I am very pleased with my purchase."
"The producer suggest, that copy one DVD is about 8 minutes - using function "copy and compare" full size DVD takes approximately 23-25 minutes to copy AND verify."
"Couldn't copy dvds of movies, but not duplicators fault."
"I'm a firearms instructor and hand out cd's with information burnt on them at the end of classes."
"It works and does not frustrate me !"