External optical drive?

[Angel]

Any suggestions for a good external optical drive as I have programs I will need to load.

 

[riggi]

Any USB drive should work.

I have 2 lying around from the last 2 laptops I bought that didn't have optical drives and the shop/OEM threw them in for "free".
1 Samsung, 1 Dell.
Both work fine.
I keep one at home and 1 at work to use with my laptop and SP.

Unless you are using it a lot (in which case you probably wouldn't have bought a SP) I'd just get the cheapest you can find. I use mine 3 or 4 times a year, if that.

 

[TeknoBlast]

Same here, I bought an external dvd drive for about $15 and it has worked great on my non-dvd devices.

 

[Angel]

So you don't have to have a 3.0?

 

[bertopl]

also, if just using it to load a few programs, if you have other computers on your home network with an optical drive, you can share the drive and install from there, no? or maybe just copy the contents onto a usb drive should work to install stuff too.

 

[Angel]

Yeah I wanted to do that but the drive on my laptop won't read ISO software, tried everything it simply won't recognize it. So if the pro doesn't require a 3.0 drive then I will buy a decent but cheap version to load my programs and any new software will be downloads or flash load able. Could anyone confirm the 3.0 issue? Thanks a lot everyone!

 

[J515OP]

You don't need a USB 3.0 device. USB 3.0 is backwards compatible and USB 2.0 devices work just fine

 

[Angel]

Thank you so much

 

[ORB1T4L]

Hi !

Can I use an external optical drive to reinstall W8 Pro if something goes wrong with the pre-installed version ?

Thanks

 

[Buelligan]

Yeah, I was going to buy and external drive also, but discovered that I could just "map a network drive" to the one in my gaming tower and it works perfectly!. On my home network of course. So until I have the need for a disk drive on the go that works for me.