USB CD ROM drive, cheap!!

Hi, I bought one of these on Ebay a couple of weeks ago. Very small and light, works perfectly with my AAO. You can boot a new OS or reinstall your original OS with this, no problems, it's plug and play, at least with XP.
Drive itself cost about $4, airmail shipping took about 7 days, and cost about $10.
http://cgi.ebay.com/Super-Slim-External ... 240%3A1318

 

in case anyone is looking, i grabbed a Samsung Ultra Slim DVDRW drive for about $50 from newegg.com

it's very slim.reads/writes DVDRWs and the best thing is it's USB powered.

the caveat is that it needs TWO usb ports to power this thing.

 

Does it also read & Write CD's?

 

The drive for $4.00 only reads CD-R and CD-RW, it does not burn CD's.
Here is a more current link.
http://stores.ebay.com/buyertrend

 

I think I paid about $20 for mine on ebay. It is cd/dvd rom drive, so I can watch movies with it. And it is white to match my AAO. It does come with two USB cables, but you only have to use two if the drive isn't getting enough power and lags. I have tried it with CD and DVD and used it to load CD based applications and so far I have not had any issue with only one USB connection. It has two USB inputs and two seperate USB cables, so if you just using one the other is not in the way. And to top it off, it came from a retailer in NY and arrived about three days after purchase. I am pretty happy with it. I don't use it to often but it sure comes in handy when I need it.

 

Well that is really the upside of having to get the more dates software and hardware, is that you can really get it pretty cheap if you know where to look. The internet is a great place to find some deals, and if you do some homework and look around a little bit you can find a lot of things for cheap. Glad to heard somebody is having success with Ebay, I have yet to get that.

 

CDs and DVDs and BluRays are just a dying breed, physical media is just going to fade away completely in the coming years, or maybe months, now it's very unpractical to have physical media since we have USB drivers, portable media like portable HDDs and we have the biggest time saver of all which is the cloud.

 

I'm also mulling on this issue because our tv which is 2 years old has only the USB socket and unlike the older models, there's no CD slot anymore so CD and DVD are not playable in the new models of tv. And with that, I'm sure computer systems will follow to mean that the CD/DVD drive will be obsolete in a year or 2. It is not a prediction but just my opinion based on the trends of technology that I'm seeing. Even the sound system of our 3-year old car has a USB slot so maybe the next models will be with no CD drive anymore.

 

I'm not so sure I agree with your statement fully.
Although they are no longer mainstream devices their use for cheap home backup on a non-volatile media will continue for some time.

I back up my photos onto a NAS drive as well as having "working" copies on my machine but for those items I cannot bear to loose I also back them up onto a DVD and store it where it cannot be scratched.
I have had too many hard drives and USB drives fail to rely on them solely as non-volatile back up. So I personally don't see them dying away completely until something else to directly replace them comes out...which with the likes of Cloud storage being the way forward will never happen.

 

I never use my CD drive because it is lousy, and win 8.1 doesn't play movies without a special player being installed, which I have never been able to find a good one, so it is just one of the things that I am stuck with I guess. I don't see these drives being important devices of the future to be placed on laptops. I could be wrong, but they don't have the use they once did.

 

It might be true. As more and more of my new software are bought in the form of downloading. Yet, I still have some old software/games/movies on physical discs. I'd still like to use them sometimes. My Surface Pro 4 doesn't even have a CD/DVD-ROM. So a USB CD/DVD-ROM is certainly useful. I wouldn't recommend to buy internal CD/DVD-ROM any more though as it might not fit your next computer. An external device can be used on any future computers no problem and can be easily put away when no in use.