Hitachi LG External CD/DVD Drive | Portable Player Burner for Laptop, PC, Smartphone | USB Type-C | Multi OS (Window, Mac OS15, Android, Fire) (White)

This review is in the context of using this devise exclusively for burning cds to a cell phone. So the product itself is great. It's small, light weight and comes with appropriate cables. I bought it to record my huge cd collection directly onto my phone. It rips and plays just fine and I was elated since I no longer own a computer to rip cds to. I have not attempted to use it for burning or watching/ripping dvds. The housing appears to be plastic but it's sufficient. The software is garbage. You have to download software from the play store. It does work, sometimes. It constantly ceases to function. There is no 100% technique to get it to work again. It just sometimes will work and most of the time won't. The interface is bad also. It's not plainly laid out, it's just very poorly done. It defaults to a directory to save, probably 80% of the time rather than the previous set destination. It just sometimes keeps your last settings and sometimes doesn't, so if you get it to work, you have to re-choose format and directory each time. It also saves songs in a random order, instead of how the Playlist is on the disc. It does capture meta data, like album artwork, which is nice. After burning maybe 10 cds to my phone, exhausted with the constant errors and locked up software, I gave up. The quality of the mp3's is pretty good, even offers lossless, high, medium and low bit recording. It boggles my mind why lg/Hitachi doesn't release some decent software for this product. I can't be the only person who keeps physical music. Even if I had to buy software separately, I would, if it worked 100% and had a decent interface.

Purchased this DVD drive to work with my Macbook Pro. It works very well...much better than the Apple CD/DVD player. Faster and more reliable. I was concerned because the box indicated it was only for connection to Android devices. But investigating on the manufacturer website did indicate it will work with other OS's. I plugged it in and my laptop recognized it immediately. It is fast and seems very reliable. Plus, with the DVD being ejected as a drawer instead of just a slot, it is possible to clean any dust off the head. I do recommend this for quality, speed, and ease of use.

Received the Hitachi LC DVD drive in a reasonable amount of time even with terrible weather conditions so thank you Amazon. What not happy with is the unit I received was a used item, box been open and item had been used by someone else. Apparently it must not have been what they expected so guess was returned back to Amazon. Sadly instead of Amazon placing this in their used / open box area to be sold it was again sold as being new never open or used. Usually there is a decent amount of price difference between new and used / open box items. So kind of feel as if was being taken advantage of just a little by Amazon. As for as the Drive, it seems to perform well using both an android cell phone and android tablet. Actually kind of amazing that it works as well as it does using only the one cable for power and data along with being a micro USB style connection which also means data transfer will be slower than using USB 3 data path. Though will say the transfer rate between drive and cell phone is decent so can't complain. Thought about doing a return for replacement or some type of discount since it was used even with the devcie working as notice some mentioned failure after only a few weeks of usage so not sure if the previous owner may have had this issue after a few weeks and why it was return. After checking about doing a return, notice that this model is no longer available so return for exchange is out of the question and do not see any other devices which mention will work with android devices. Since I do not have another external usb style DVD that could test and see if a windows base dvd drive would work also with android devices if using the right cable my only choice at the moment is to keep this one and hope for the best. Maybe Hitachi will see this or Amazon will see and contact me about a replacement if they have one which is new and working or provide some type of discount in case there are issues later on after the return / warranty period has expired. I would say overall it seems work as promise in their ads and is very small / light weight portable which could be very handy when using a tablet or cell phone. It is allowing me an easy alternate method to transfer pictures / documents to use on my tablet and cell phone without doing some other route such as wifi transfer or using flash drives and taking the time to transfer files from a CD / DVD to a flash drive then insert the flash drive into my android device so saves time and effort. I guess one nice thing is the concept of working with all types of Operating systems and its portable use making it easy to carry with you when is needed. I do like the idea of being able to quickly transfer files over from a DVD / CD to my cell phone / tablet quickly and also the bonus that it can be used for watching movies or listening to audio music cd's. Those features also work well.

Use this to rip cd audio to WAV files using XLD. Does the job, uses one single cable.

Didn't know what to do with this, except that I needed to rip about 30 CD, audio, pics and data. Once I got the product, unpacked it and installed the CD, I knew that I could do a lot more with this versatile writer. More of that later... This comes bundled with a installer CD that you need to pop into the drive, connect using the USB cable and you are in business! Once the software is installed (My laptop runs on Windows 10, but it can work on Mac as well Android phones too). The surprise was that it came with a small USB C connector. This can be used as a way to download and back up from any USB C device, phones tablets etc, and copy it to a CD as a back up. Not that you need to, but the option exists ....However I primarily used it to back up my various CD/DVD and each one took anywhere from 3 mins to about 20 mins, depends on the content in the media. What was really impressive that it read all formats of spinning discs that were nearly 15 years old and it did it without much of fuss and I was able to repeatedly do it over and again. In a nutshell, this an amazing piece of equipment. I am done with my project, however I am keeping this gem and loaning it to my friends and family. (*NOT a sponsored review, of course!)

This external drive initially worked burning audio onto high quality brand CD's. But at age a little over a year and less than one burn per month, it now runs inconsistently, like a piece of junk: sometimes it burns an audio CD fine, and the next CD with the exact same burning setup it runs the burn with noise like an airplane, takes much longer to do the burn, and fails to burn correctly causing gaps or failure of the audio. The inconsistency ruins the CD being used for hte burn. Can no longer use it, regret the purchase.

Works instantly with Windows OS. If you have a Chromebook, your out of luck unless you run a Linux distro as well. Now, it will work on Android devices, but the documentation will not tell you how. Another reviewer discovered you have to install UD Link as well as TrueDVD+ ... not a very intuitive, but you can play DVDs. Accessing it for data and other av material is awkward, but doable. So it was worth the money for my uses ... it's disfunctioanlity with Chromebooks is Google's fault, based on my research. So, for windows, do nothing. Chromebook users are out of luck (you can access data as read only), Android users ... install UDLink, then TrueDVD+.

A great product that fills a real need. I wanted to be able to watch DVDs on my Samsung Galaxy 7 tablet, but tablets don't come with DVD drives -- in fact, most laptops don't come with DVD drives anymore. This Hitachi drive is small, lightweight, easy to attach, and easy to use. I usually watch DVDs in bed, and it's perfect for that. It's also easy to take along when you travel. Now I don't have to pay for NetFlix, because I can watch any movie I can get from my county library. And even if I do pay for NetFlix (because it has exclusives), I can get movies from the library that NetFlix doesn't have, especially classics. As the product listing discloses, you do have to buy an app, for about $3 or $5, for this to work, so just consider that part of the purchase price. The app is easy to use and works well; even after my tablet and the Hitachi drive have been turned off, it remembers where I was in a video, and it picks up where I left off.