Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Whilst scanning Amazon for a USB CD/DVD writer, I spotted an ASUS unit -a well established and highly reputable brand- and the price and review ratings were good, so I bought it. Upon receiving the drive and copying some files off a CD to a solid state hard drive (SSD) it seemed the drive was a bit pokey on the transfer rate. So I ordered two other USB writers from Amazon; this Samsung unit and an Amazon Basics unit. After timing the transfer rate on all three drives, as well as measuring the transfer rate on my four year old HP DV6 laptop for reference, I realized that the ASUS was not so pokey after all... but I also stumbled on the fact the Samsung unit was three times faster than any of the other drives, including my laptop! All told I think the Samsung is a better deal. Here is a mini-review: Drive models tested: ASUS External Slim 8X DVD-RW Writer (ASUS External Slim 8X DVD-RW Stylish Cut Design Optical Drive SDRW-08D2S-U/BLK/G/AS) Samsung USB 2.0 Ultra Portable External DVD Writer (Samsung USB 2.0 Ultra Portable External DVD Writer Model SE-218CB/RSBS) AmazonBasics USB 2.0 8x DVD Writer (AmazonBasics USB 2.0 8x DVD Writer External Optical Drive (Black)) Speed Tests: Transfer Rate (copy 266MB file from CDROM to SSD) Windows 8.1 ASUS drive.............1.25MB/s avg (3 minutes 18 seconds) Samsung drive..........3.0MB/s avg (1 minutes 35 seconds) Amazon Basics drive....1.10MB/s avg (3 minutes 25 seconds) HP laptop..............1.2MB/s avg (3 minutes 20 seconds) Included Software: ASUS drive............A couple of power management utilities, and a link to a firmware upgrade procedure that did not work. Samsung drive.........Nero Express Essentials v12 (media management utilities, backup utilities, media player*, firmware updater) Amazon Basics drive...Cyberlink Media Suite v10 (media management utilities, no media player) * requires $5 upgrade to play MPEG media such as DVD movies I did not run any burning benchmarks, mainly because I was short of blank media at the time. But the ASUS and the Amazon Basics units would have to have some remarkably better burn speeds over the Samsung to beat it out, given that I read from CD/DVD media far more often that I write to it. The Samsung also has the best bundled software. It actually comes with a media player, albeit a crippled one that requires an update to play DVD movies encoded with the popular MPEG-2 compression codec. To be fair, a royalty is paid to the MPEG mafia for each unit of player software that includes the MPEG codec (the word is that Windows 8 doesn't include a media player for MPEG movies because Microsoft no longer wanted to pay a $2 license fee to distribute the codecs in a world increasingly moving to streaming media).