Review on LG Electronics Portable External GP40NB40 by Covey Palmer

Many modern portable PCs don't have a CD/DVD drive or the ability to build one internally. This omission is partly caused by smaller form factors that are designed for portability in size and weight. But even for systems physically large enough to hold a single device, the need for an optical drive is ever decreasing. Almost all applications and device drivers are available on the Internet, eliminating the need to ship software on physical media, where it can become obsolete before the media even reaches the user. /or the writer is still needed. People who haven't migrated all of their old CD collections still need to copy them to their hard drives. Burning custom audio CDs from iTunes playlists is still a clever way to give friends a nice gift (a holdover from the "mix" cassette days). And if you don't have internet access ready, a physical medium is the only way out. So is my situation where I have a couple of systems that don't have an optical drive and need it from time to time. The LG GP50NB40 external drive is just what I needed to support my Lenovo IdeaPad Yoga 11S ultraportable laptop and Mac mini (Mid 2011). Apple was one of the first to eliminate optical drives from its products, and many Windows vendors followed suit. While there are many external drive options on the market, many of them are much more expensive and likely have redundant features for most users in today's 2015 world. This LG drive is perfect for my needs. My son does yoga in college where he performs music and has to browse and rip music from CDs. My daughter is in high school and from time to time needs to install software that still exists on physical media and wants to rip and burn audio CDs for her friends from time to time. They won't be heavy users, but if they need it, now they have it. I tested the device on both of their computers and on my regular desktop computer, which already has an optical drive. Everything worked as expected. No manual or automatic driver or application installation was required - everything worked right out of the box. The product comes with an application CD, but I don't need it and haven't tried it. Other devices I found upon purchase required a separate power supply or a second USB line to provide adequate power to the drive. This one is better in that only one USB cable is required for data transfer and power delivery. Before making this purchase I read previously published reviews and some warned of Mac compatibility issues regarding Mac OS not recognizing the drive unless the drive was already in the device. I thought that was correct, but I don't see the problem. Mac OS X Finder will show the device once the disc is inserted into the drive. If for some reason the disc gets stuck in the device, there is a pinhole that you can insert a paper clip in for easy enough manual ejection of the disc. Having just received the product and tested it for basic functionality, I can't say how well it will work. withstand use over time. But its small size and price, combined with the convenience of using a single cable for both data and power, make this product an ideal choice for those who own modern computers without an internal optical drive.