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

Finally found a drive that works with the Mac Mini M4. The problem with most drives is that there is insufficient USB power coming off the Mini to "light them up". This drive is compact, comes with two USB cables (I'm using USB-C. Mac is running Sequoia 15.3.2. All the drivers you need are built into the Mac software. Plug the drive in, insert a CD disc, and it shows up on the desktop. Drag the disc icon to the trash and the loading tray opens up so that you can retrieve the disc. Audio discs can be ripped straight to Apple Music with the Sequoia software. Just the way it should be.

I ordered this to replace my Apple Superdrive that finally went out on me. I wanted an external drive that only needed a single cable connection & was compatible with my iMac. Other drives I looked at had a two cable set up and I didn't want that extra cable on my desk.This was more expensive than other brands but I know Hitachi and LG electronics have a proven track record. I would prefer a slot loader to this tray mount but this works fine.This was a plug and play and played a CD and DVD without any problems. You can either press the button to eject or with a Mac you can eject it in FINDER.

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.

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.