Ask HN: Are there any good external CD/DVD drives?

1 pointsebastian_z2 comments

I would appreciate any recommendations. I am looking for a quality optical CD/DVD drive. I have had two different drives so far but each broke after just after two years of modest use. I have never had this problem when those drives were still built into computers. It seems all drives are of poor quality.

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A lot of external drives are just laptop drives in an external case with a SATA to USB converter board and a huge markup. You can fix yours by buying laptop drives which are very cheap, although I just checked eBay and a brand new external drive is only ~15 bucks here so seems like it might still be cheaper to just buy cheap stuff and replace every couple years than buying a quality one.

Pioneer used to be the highest quality and most expensive drives back in the day.

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