What Is an External CD/DVD Drive?

These are portable optical drives that are housed in an external casing and can be carried around and attached to different systems. There are external USB DVD drives, external DVD writer drives, external CD-RW drives, etc. Every type of optical drive built into laptops and desktops has its external counterpart.

Connecting Ports and Other Details

USB is the most commonly used interface for external CD/DVD drives. However, there are also external drives that use Firewire ports to connect to the laptop or netbook. Most external DVD writers and external CD writers will need a separate power supply along with the USB connection for burning optical discs. This power supply unit comes with the USB cable and does not require an extra purchase.

Advantages of an External Optical Drive

External optical drives are usually used when there is no internal optical drive in the notebook or the existing drive is damaged and unusable. Owners of Apple Macbook Air, Asus Eee PC, Acer Aspire One and many other HP, Toshiba, Dell and Lenovo netbooks will find this very device very useful because those machines do not come with a built-in optical drive. External optical disc burner drives are also used by those who have the CD readers that only read and don’t burn CD and DVD. Or if your CD-ROM is a CD-RW type, you might find the portable drive handy to watch and burn DVDs with.

Apart from becoming an optical drive for systems that don’t have one, external optical drives are also very useful because of their portability. Hence, if you need to use a lot of DVDs all the time and cannot trust for every system you work on to have DVD drives, you can get an external DVD writer and read and burn DVDs whenever you need to.

Buying External Optical Drives

The most convenient way of buying these external drives is online, especially because if you are reading this you are already at the right place. We carry CD and DVD readers and writers that are compatible with all laptop makes and all operating systems.