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The drive arrived in good shape before the scheduled date.It installed on my netbook seamlessly when I first plugged it in and I was able to load my software on cd's and dvd's right away. I am very happy with this external dvd drive.
Power supply immediately failed with a loud pop as soon as I took it out of the box and plugged it in
works great like 3 months i keep it open and just swap out the drive till i can get more. solid though the 5.25 opening has a plastic plate you can pop out for a cd/dvd. so the faceplate popped off while unpacking luckily i had one from an old comp that fit.
Fan opening is 2 small slits, one blocked by the fan. A fantastic price, but poor quality - fan was stuck - I had to push it, now it buzzes loudly and vibrates the whole case. I would replace the fan, but it is MELTED IN. Works ok with DVD drive. ~~works with a hard drive - it is fast, 27M/s, but without SMART support (smartctl from smartmontools/linux) it is risky - no warning of overheating if fan were to quit,no warning if drive were getting flaky, AFAIK you can't shut down the drive before you turn off power - this is said to reduce drive life if done often.For HD you need side mounting brackets.
I stuck my neck out a little when I ordered the Sabrent enclosure. Fan noise. Since the unit cost just enough to qualify for Amazon's Super Saver shipping, I paid no shipping charges. After reading those, when I opened the package from Amazon I was pleasantly surprised to find a nice looking unit with a little heft to it and case that looked well made. I don't expect it to have hard use, and I won't travel with it, so I see no reason why I shouldn't be using it for a long time. I slipped in a good Plextor DVD burner that I had salvaged from a computer I had just scrapped,screwed the face plate on the enclosure and plugged in two cables and the power adapter and hooked it up to a USB port on my Asus eeePC netbook. Some of the user reviews fussed about a loud fan or problems with screws, etc. In the unit I received it was virtually non-existent.
It immediately read a CD and then played a DVD movie without any problems and with no further tinkering and without needing the tiny "user manual" leaflet that came in the package. Drivers included on a mini-CD are for Windows 98SE and are not needed with Windows 2000/ME/XP. I'm extremely pleased with both the price and the value of this drive. A good cheap drive, a good cheap little baby computer -- good deal.
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