LG Electronics GP50NB40 8X USB 2.0 Slim Portable DVD Rewriter External Drive with M-DISC Support, Black

Many modern portable PCs have no CD/DVD drive or ability to internally install one. The omission is partly driven by the smaller form factors designed for mobility in size and weight. But even for systems physically large enough to house one, there is an ever-decreasing need for using an optical drive in the first place. Almost all applications and device drivers are available on the Internet which negates the need to ship software on physical media of any sort where it’s likely to be obsolete before such media ever arrives to its user.Yet there remain times where a CD/DVD reader and/or writer is still needed. People who haven’t transferred all of their old CD collections still need to rip them onto their hard drives. Burning custom audio CDs from iTunes playlists is still a reasonable way to give friends a nice gift (a carryover from the “mix” cassette days). And if you don’t happen to have ready access to the Internet, having physical media is the only way to go.So is the case for my situation where I have a couple of systems that don’t have an optical drive and need one every so often. The LG GP50NB40 external drive is just what I needed for supporting my Lenovo IdeaPad Yoga 11S ultraportable and a Mac mini (mid-2011). Apple was an early mover in eliminating optical drives from their products, and many Windows vendors have now followed suit. While there are lots of choices in the market for external drives, many are way more expensive and likely overkill in features for most users in the modern world of 2015.This LG drive is perfect for my needs. My son uses the Yoga in college where he’s a music performance major and needs to view and rip music from CDs. My daughter in high school and needs occasional software installs that still ship on physical media and wants to rip and burn audio CDs for her friends once in a while. They will not be heavy-duty users, but when they need it, they’ll now have it.I tested the unit on both of their computers and on my traditional desktop machine that already has an optical drive. Everything worked as expected. No manual or automatic installation of drivers or applications were needed—it just worked right out of the box. The product comes with a CD of apps, but I don’t need them and didn’t try them out. Other units I found while shopping required a separate power adapter or a second USB line for providing sufficient power to the drive. This one is superior in needing only one USB cable to handle both data and power.Before I made this purchase, I read reviews already posted and some warned of issues with Mac compatibility regarding Mac OS not recognizing the drive unless a disk was already inserted in the unit. I found this to be true, but see no issue. The Mac OS X Finder will show the device once a disk is placed in the drive. If a disk gets stuck in the unit for whatever reason, there’s a pin hole where a paper clip point can be inserted to manually eject the disk easily enough.Having just received and tested the product for basic functionality, I cannot claim how well it will endure use over time. But the small size and price with the convenience of a single cable for both data and power, this product looks like it’ll be perfect anyone with modern-day computers that have no internal optical drive.

Bought this LG GP50NB40 burner/player as I needed some light duty drive for my laptop which came sans dvd. This thing sure is the lightest and most fragile-seeming drive I've ever seen. Don't think I would just toss it in my laptop bag without some sort of hard case. My main concern, with such a low price, was whether it would play nicely with linux. So I connected to my ubuntu 14.04 laptop, stuck in a dvd and it played (after some adding some libraries). Using the VLC player the intro video part worked but the menus would not. Some libraries need installing, that is "sudo apt-get install libdvdcss2 libdvdread4 libdvdnav4" and also you have to do something akin to "sudo apt-get install libdvdread4 && sudo /usr/share/doc/libdvdread4/install-css.sh". After that, the disc menus would function. Then I stuck in a run-of-the-mill Imation 700MB blank CD (bought probably 10 to 15 years ago) and using the ubuntu stock burner "Brasero" burned the disk with 7 ~100MB files (668MiB) with the speed set to "maximum". While burning it ran from about 7x to 13x, peaking at about 20x towards the end and it took 4 min 23 sec to burn but with finalizing and creating the image checksum the total from hitting the start button to finish took 9 minutes 20 seconds when the disk ejected. For my purposes, this ain't too shabby. Then I reinserted the data CD, which had mp4 video files on it, and it ran fine, and for kicks tried it out on a windows machine and it also worked. I had no blank dvd's handy so I can't say what the story is there. But for now I know it plays dvd, writes cd, and for on-the-go I would say get a hard case because I think one trip to the floor and it is toast. For the price though, it's a 5 star buy and if it breaks on me too soon I'll return here and revise the review as needed.

I needed something to burn CDs on a laptop where I removed the DVD burner in order to put in a second harddrive to more easily dual boot windows/linux. It is always a pain to put the DVD burner back in so figured I would pick up an external. I rarely burn so I didn't want to spend a lot. I have found LG products to be low priced and usually functional so I went with this model (the one with 50 in the model number). Linux had a little trouble recognizing so I just booted into Windows instead. Worked fine in windows. I am not sure why linux had trouble recognizing it, since I have the option to dual boot Windows it was not a deal killer and I didn't bother tearing my hair out to get it going in PCLinuxOS. Those of you who run linux are probably familiar with hair tearing. Sometimes it is just easier to go over to the dark side and boot windows.One thing about this item, it is SO lightweight that the usb cable which is a bit stiff can actually flip it all over. You have to get the USB cable to lie nice in order to have the unit sit flush.