Although this drive is now getting a bit long in the tooth, it is far from past it, especially as the retail price has dropped. I purchased this drive some months ago for one of my own machines, and as person who deals with PC components on a regular basis, I am still more than happy with it, even though newer and much faster drives are now available. Faster drives are only really important if you are copying data from disk and not mush of an issue if you are actually watching DVD's. However that said, I would recommend anybody looking for a CD drive to get a DVD instead of a CD, as in my experience they are better at reading disks such as CDR's 7 CDRW's. ...  Read the complete review

Hardware improves at a dramatic rate, and this is shown by the toshiba. However it has already been overshadowed by the next generation of DVD drives which can do everything faster. I first came into contact with this drive when I bought my first (terrible) computer from a computer fair. One of the only good parts of it was this drive. It's fast, moderately quiet and reliable. My only complaint with it would be the slow rate of opening it has. Press the eject button and about 2 seconds later it responds. It is a 8x DVD and 40x CD with 10,800 KB/s max. sustained transfer rate DVD, using the ATAPI interface. For DVD movies it is more than adaquate ...  Read the complete review