I strongly recommend that you make sure you get one that supports USB 3.0 (or even USB 3.1 if your laptop supports it).īottom line: Adding an optical drive to your laptop couldn’t be easier or less expensive. Note: Some of the cheaper drives come with USB 2.0 connections. Amazon sells external USB DVD/RW drives for as little as $15, and all you have to do is plug them into an open USB port! Luckily, adding a DVD/RW drive to most any laptop is both inexpensive and easy. That’s why it makes sense to have an optical drive ready and waiting for the rare times when we need one.
#External cd rom for mac usb amazone software
There’s also an awful lot of legacy software still sitting around on optical discs, and we occasionally need to re-install it. While its true that the optical drive is rarely used anymore, there are still lots of folks who like to listen to CDs and watch DVDs on their computers. “Light and thin” is the current catch phrase, and the lightest and thinnest laptops, by necessity, don’t include optical drives. There are two reasons why laptop manufacturers have started skipping the optical drives when designing new laptops:ġ – Since most software, music, movies and other forms of digital media is now either downloaded or streamed via the Internet, the need for optical drives has diminished to where it makes little economic sense to include them in new laptops.Ģ – Being lightweight and easy to carry is one of the major selling points of laptops these days. In fact, DVD burners and Blueray drives have become quite rare in some of the latest models. If you’ve been checking out the latest laptops and ultrabooks, you’ve probably noticed that many of them don’t come with an optical drive. Thank you.Note:The links in this post are affiliate links. Note: Purchases made through these links help support SplatF. But for a moment, today - and for the low price of $35 - I felt decades younger. It took me back to an era when CDs were expensive, precious objects to be treated with absolute care - not cheap plastic things you stacked in a spindle or left out for months, upside-down, on top of the DVD player.Īnyway, then I tucked the drawer in, fired up my app, and took care of business. (At least it didn’t require a caddy, like my old Apple SCSI CD-ROM drives.) Pressing an actual button to eject a disc drawer, then carefully loading the disc - using that weird, round, crunchy-sounding thing in the middle that holds the disc in, which I haven’t seen since a Discman - felt positively ’90s.
I have only used self-loading, slot-based optical drives since about 2007, and rarely, at that.
The real reason I am writing this review, however, is to relay the strange but delightful experience of loading a DVD into a disc drawer for the first time in years. But if it’s stashed in a cabinet most of the time, who cares.
And it comes with a weird dual-headed USB cord that you don’t need with a Mac. The downside: It’s moderately ugly, in an AmazonBasics kind of way. It works! And it’s $40 cheaper than Apple’s $75 USB SuperDrive. So I added the $35 AmazonBasics DVD drive to a recent order. The optical drive in my iMac is getting moody, and there have been a few times when I wished I’d had an external disc drive around to use with my MacBook Air.
0 kommentar(er)
