The Swiss army knife of USB DVD drives is on sale, also features a built-in M.2 SSD slot, USB hub, and SATA hard drive dock — $26 for DVD writer and hub, $39 gets an added SATA or M.2 SSD dock

Portable USB optical drives — (Image credit: Amazon)

An external USB DVD drive can still be incredibly handy in 2025. With desktops and laptops now almost certain to eschew an optical drive, keeping one of these peripherals around will help you retain access to your collection of old software and media for years and PC generations to come. So, we've spotted some very attractively priced Cyber Monday drives on Amazon, and we just had to share: the External CD/DVD Drive for Laptop, DVD Player for Laptop, 8 in 1 USB 3.0 Ultra-Slim Portable at $26.99, and the CD DVD Drive External, Portable CD DVD Driver +/-RW Burner with 2.5" SATA, SD Card Reader and USB A Type C 2.0 Hub at $36.60.

The latter adds the convenience of SATA drive docking to the equation. Plus an External SUIDEK portable CD/DVD burner with USB Hub and M.2 Dock for $39, adding an M.2 SSD dock.

The BPAKDU drive gets you lots of media connectivity options. This attractive portable device, with a metallic honeycomb finish in four colors, can read and write optical media at CD 24X and DVD 8X speeds. That's not all, as it also offers a USB 3.0 hub, 3x USB 2.0 ports, SD and TF card slots readers, and a USB-C port.

Compatibility of the BPAKDU External CD/DVD Drive for Laptop, DVD Player for Laptop, 8 in 1 USB 3.0 Ultra-Slim Portable is also pretty extensive. For optical media, you can use CD±R/RW, CD-ROM, DVD±R/RW, DVD-RAM, VCD, and SVCD, the listing claims. Then, for systems/OS, you can plug this into Windows 11, 10, 8, 7, XP, Vista, Linux, MacOS 10.6 or above computers.

Those who feel that some SATA docking functionality will be useful might want to look closer at the Suideck optical drive and dock. For your $36.60, you will have one portable device which can be used to read and write optical media at CD 24X and DVD 8X speeds. Again, there's a basic USB hub built in with 2x USB 2.0 ports, a USB-C port, plus SD and TF card readers. Extra appeal comes from the SATA 2.5-inch slot atop, which can be used for quick access to your old laptop hard drives or SSDs in what was once a very popular form factor.

This product listing isn't specific about things like DVD±R/RW, DVD-RAM support, but the exact same list of system/OS support is given: Windows 11, 10, 8, 7, XP, Vista, Linux, MacOS 10.6 or above.

All of the deals look like useful and bargain-a-licious Prime Day purchases. For $26.99, you can get the External CD/DVD Drive for Laptop, DVD Player for Laptop, 8-in-1 USB 3.0 Ultra-Slim Portable, and it will read/write most of the common optical disks you will have lying around from the 2000s.

If your wants/needs expand to 2.5-inch SATA drive docking, then the $36.60 gets the CD DVD Drive External, Portable CD DVD Driver +/-RW Burner with 2.5" SATA, SD Card Reader and USB A Type C 2.0 Hub is going to be hard to resist.

If the requirements expand a further stage to needing an M.2 SSD dock, the Suideck portable CD/DVD burner with USB Hub and M.2 Dock for $39.99 is the ultimate Swiss Army knife of portable external optical drives. We're also happy to see both brands' peripherals score 4.3/5 or better on the Amazon reviews, as we haven't tested these ourselves.

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Mark Tyson is a news editor at Tom's Hardware. He enjoys covering the full breadth of PC tech; from business and semiconductor design to products approaching the edge of reason.

6 Comments Comment from the forums

gdmaclew

Beware!
SUIDEK TECHNOLOGY INTERNATIONAL LIMITED was established on February 1, 2025 , one year ago . Its legal status is a foreign company not registered with the Trade and Companies Register (RCS ). Its business activity is mail-order sales via general catalog . It had no employees.
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evermorex76

Those Suidek drives are not open about the speed of the computer connection. They only say it's a USB 2.0 hub, which makes me think the device itself may be only USB 2.0, despite the apparent blue connector, because surely they'd mention USB 3 if it supported that. They also mention the M.2 SSD support as 10Gbps which isn't even a valid number for NVMe so they're implying USB3.1 but not saying it. They also use the words high speed, not super speed. The specifications on the SATA model say the hardware interface is USB 2, but also say 5 gigabits per second. The M.2 model says 10. Given the number of references to USB-C but not the version, I'd bet this is 2.0 (cheap as hell interface chip), which is plenty for the CD/DVD speeds and basic flash drives, but is going to choke the life out of even the slowest SATA drive, let alone NVMe. People will buy these expecting those slots to actually be usable and may be sorely disappointed. Only one review says they used the SSD slot; they say it worked fine but didn't mention speed.
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gdmaclew

Tom's review reads more like an advertisement.
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gdmaclew

We're also happy to see both brands' peripherals score 4.3/5 or better on the Amazon reviews, as we haven't tested these ourselves.

Maybe you should, instead of looking for ways to earn commissions,
Reply
evermorex76

gdmaclew said:
Tom's review reads more like an advertisement.
They do have it tagged as DEALS. It's not a review, just information about a product that's on sale or just a good price, however they get commissions for the links, which goes toward funding their price searching feature and other content. Maybe they're sent listings to be highlighted since they're often just random categories that they wouldn't normally bother with.

I don't expect an actual review of the products. It's basically a long-form ad. The problem is they're just taking whatever listing information the seller provided and jazzing it up into paragraph form with added promotional words about the features and why they're good (and an opener about why the items might be useful to you). They aren't being critical of the information in the listing at all, pointing out any downsides or weird phrases that don't make sense, verifying that the claims are true, that the numbers in the reviews actually reflect reviews that seem to be real (like this one where almost nobody used the SSD features, and some low scores seemed to be people who didn't know what they were doing or how these things work), etc., so they may be promoting items that actually are "too good to be true" by having such a low price for what sounds like an amazing product, which is very often the case with these random no-name brands for commodity devices. Most of the electronics and motors in all of these type of devices are probably made by the same company, assembled by the particular brand with their custom shells and the chips programmed with a brand name/model. (Alternately, a high-ish price doesn't necessarily mean it's quality.) I suppose they don't HAVE to do any vetting of the products and just point them out to us and we can make a decision just as if we'd browsed and found them ourselves, but by selecting particular items out of the thousands like them, there is an implication that Tom's backs them as a good buy; they just don't actually do anything to justify such backing. (This is probably not even a new topic, may have already been brought up by someone and addressed by the site, satisfactorily or not.)

I also just noticed they called these "Cyber Monday" drives, which makes no sense, since Cyber Monday comes after Black Friday in November (and this was posted on Tuesday), and the rest of the page explicitly says they're about Prime Day deals. And it took two people to throw this together?
Reply
blenderbach

Tewu has it cheaper than Awazon
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