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Written by Paul Moons | 30 March 2008
Posted in Reviews - Storage

USB Slim Portable DVD-ROM Drive

With dimensions of 13.25 x 13.5 x 16cm and a weight of just 255g, the Slim Portable DVD-ROM Drive from USB Geek is exactly that.
 

 

Read on for the low down on this compact unit.
 

  

In the box

The USB Slim Portable DVD-ROM package comes complete with a brief manual, an 8cm driver disc and two USB connector cables. The standard USB A/B cable is supplemented by a USB to power cable.

The drive is very neatly designed and from a distance, appears to be composed of the same black material of Arthur C. Clarke’s monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Upon closer scrutiny however, the uniform blackness gives way to small details: The front of the drive has moulded “Compact Disc” and “DVD-ROM” logos, which are accompanied by a small eject button and green LED. The customary /paperclip/ hole for manually ejecting discs is also where you would expect it to be.

Slim Portable USB DVD-ROM

The base of the unit has four small rubber stoppers as well as some etched information about the drive’s fragility and the importance of reading the manual - A little rich considering how thin the manual is, really.

The rear of the unit features a female B type USB port along with a generic power port for use with the included power to USB cable. All in all, the drive is a very neat package with tight seals, clean edges with a minimum of fuss.

Usage

While the drive comes with two USB connectors - one for data and one for power - the DVD-ROM drive worked flawlessly on every computer we tested it on, with just the regular A/B USB connector connected.

When connected to our Windows XP machine, control panel reported the drive to be a “HL -DT -ST RW/DVD GCC -4244N USB Device” with 2Mb buffer. The drive reports that it can read the following media types:

•    CD-ROM
•    CD-R
•    CD-RW
•    DVD-ROM
•    DVD-R
•    DVD-RW
•    DVD+R
•    DVD+RW
•    DVD+R DL
•    DVD RAM

USB Slim Portable DVD-ROM

We had no problems reading a variety of discs in this drive and in basic CD-R read tests, the drive produced a random access seek time of around 50ms and a maximum read speed of just over 17x or 2592kB/s.

While the drive’s write features are relegated to the Compact Disc (non DVD) realm, it does support buffer underrun protection. Both CD-R and CD-RW recording is supported with a reported maximum speed of 24x.

We managed to burn a 677Mb (77:02 minute) CD-R of random data in 5 minutes, 36 seconds with a peak write speed of just over 20x using Verbatim media.

It is also worth mentioning that in both read and write tests, the drive produced little noise - even at full speed.
 

 
Conclusion

Throughout our testing the USB Slim Portable drive was connected to a variety of computers and performed without any problems in all instances.  In fact, when we connected the drive as part of our Popcorn Hour A-100 review, the device was recognised by the unit instantly and played back DVD video flawlessly.
 

 

 

Slim Portable USB DVD-ROM

  

+	-
Neat and compact design Acceptable Read and Write performance for general use Fairly quiet operation. On our equipment, worked flawlessly using only one USB connection	None.

 

 

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