Dell USB Slim DVD +/- RW Drive DW316 - Plug and Play, 8 Watt Power Consumption, Windows 11 or Below - Black

Purchased a new computer and desktops no longer have built in DVD players. I purchased this on recommendation of my computer expert. It works perfectly for CDs and music. Has a button to push to open the tray which I wanted and many do not have. Simple set up...plug in and go. Does come with extra software you can install for burning cds. I couldn't be happier.

If you have need for an optical drive, get this. Don't go for a cheaper, non-brand name alternative. This Dell is already such a great price. If using Windows, download VLC free media player. It's been the gold standard of "easy to use" media players for over 20 yrs. It just works! This combo will allow you to enjoy all your DVD movies! Most modern computers no longer have an included optical drive. This is to reduce cost and weight. It's nice to have physical media. Especially nice when the internet is down. I have multiple streaming services. None of them will work when wifi doesn't work or the internet is down in my area. Storms can knock out service anywhere in the U.S. So don't become too reliant on 100% internet life.

Recently I had a need for a DVD player for my laptop to play a few specific discs however with technology change, of course it did not have a built in optical drive. So I hit up amazon and picked out an external DVD/BD that claimed to be plug and play. But upon using it, there was no software to read discs and it would not work with the VLC software I already was familiar with and had installed. I returned it and went looking again. I came across this external player that specifically advertised it came with software to read discs as well as to burn them. It was a bonus this Dell external would save me $$. It arrived quickly and sealed. Nearly flawless plug and play but it did require a little Googling during the software installation. I ran into trouble that Windows was blocking the installation requiring Administrator access regardless that I am the admin of my own computer. If you find you run into trouble installing the PowerDVD software that comes with this drive, try the following which was taken from the Microsoft Answers Community Forum: 1. type "command prompt" into the search bar and then RIGHT click it to "Run as Administrator". 2. in the command prompt window type "net user administrator /active:yes" and it should follow with "The command completed successfully" message. 3. from the Start window and your user profile, click it to change to the Administrator profile and wait for it to be set up. 4. locate the setup.exe file for the software and install it. 5. switch back to your original user profile from the Start window. 6. to disable the Admin account access the Command Prompt with Admin rights and type "net user administrator /active:no" which will also be followed by the message "The command completed successfully" This worked perfectly for me, and the software has had no issues reading the DVDs I placed in the drive. The drive initial disc spin up has a little bit of noise but then the drive quiets back down and is not noticeable during playback. Highly recommend this drive with its included PowerDVD software.

I've only had it for a few hours, but I've been able to rip about 30 CDs so far, which is most of my collection. I didn't even need the software disc it came with, just plugged the cord into the external CD drive, plugged the USB into the USB port my laptop, and popped in my own CDs. It started right up with Windows Media Player. I configured a few settings in WMP (rip automatically and eject after ripping) and soon had a good little system going. Very easy. I'd say the only downsides so far is that after about 10 CD discs, it makes a really loud whirring noise, so for ripping CDs you should definitely plan to give this thing a break after awhile. It also takes about 3-5 minutes per CD to rip. I'm not sure if that's a long time or not, but it was fine with me. This external drive seems like it would be very portable for watching DVDs on the go, but I didn't really buy it for that, so I don't know if I'll ever test that theory. It does play DVDs, though. I'll see how it does for burning CDs later, since I have a few albums I need to burn to new CDs. Again, it's been less than 24 hours since the package with this drive got here. But I've been very impressed with it so far. 30 CD rips, rather seamlessly. Much better than the random no-name brand I had a couple years ago. I'll update this if anything changes. Edit: 2/8/26 I've been using it for CD burns lately, and I've been getting some mixed results. At first it made excellent CDs, but after a few, it's been making glitchy CDs that skip and pause, and it's not my player. So I need to figure out if that's me, or the device. I took a star off for that. It's also been good for putting CDs on my iPod.

Arrived on time, packaged very well and easy to setup.

Works just fine connected straight out of the box. True plug and play. It seems that compatibility is fine and it reads everything I have put into it. I will be doing some burning soon so I will update if there are any issues. Great price point for a slim and useful item.

Unlike the Rioddas player which was advertised as "Plug and Play" and it wasn't, the Dell DVD player came with the Media Player software disc which was easy to load via the DVD player. Leave it to Dell to do it right and make it easy. Having 71 year old hearing it's good to be able to play movies on my laptop with a set of headphones so that I can hear the dialogue better without having the sound up too loud on the tv. Thanks Dell.

awesome little product. does what it needs to do in a tiny form factor

Ce produit ne fonctionne pas sur mon pc Dell.

Es el producto especificado. No hay mucho que decir sobre los productos de Dell. Perfecto.

Nice product,work perfectly.

Compré este lector de DVD externo porque mi laptop ya no trae unidad y necesitaba algo sencillo para leer algunos discos. La verdad funcionó bien desde que lo conecté, solo fue conectar el USB y listo, sin tener que instalar nada. Algo que me gustó es que es compacto y fácil de llevar si lo necesitas para trabajar en otro lugar. Además se siente bien hecho. Lo único que podría mejorar es que el cable es algo corto. En general es una buena opción si necesitas un lector de DVD externo sencillo y confiable.