An optical drive of dubious quality

January 22, 2025

CWs: none

I purchased an inexpensive gembird-branded external optical drive (DVD-USB-04) for my main laptop a while back. It was fine for reading CD-Rs and RWs, until i tried to burn data onto a 4-12x speed CD-RW. iTunes gave me a generic error message (thanks apple), so i tested windows media player legacy and received an error that said something about the drive not supporting the speeds of the discs.

Last week, I opened it up and found… a random laptop optical drive from philips manufactured in 2012?

Now, I really like the thought of gembird refurbishing old drives and just slappin' em into an enclosure. But the only thing gembird mentions on the box and a sticker at the bottom of the drive is “Optical drive mechanics contain refurbished elements”, not that the entire drive is “refurbished”. It doesn't seem like they're very thoroughly tested, either?

Though, I would've still bought it even if I knew it was just an old drive. But whatever, it's just like an external HDD, where it's just a board that connects to the drive (Slimline SATA). So, I put an HP laptop drive from 2010 into it (featuring LightScribe :3) and it worked perfectly (yippee, the board wasn't the issue).

I find it interesting that their manual only states maximum read/write speeds but no minimum speeds. I did email gembird helpdesk and am currently awaiting response.

Helloo it is now january 22 and here's the final part / update so I can finally publish this now finished post

After a few emails with someone from helpdesk, I received the following:

“Unfortunatly after some reminders I did not receive anything from manufactory anymore.
If the disks are compatible with description, it must work.
Maybe it's defect…. You can contact the point of purchase for the warranty and replacement.
Another one must work when this one is defect.
Unfortunatly I have no longer experience with burning cd's or dvd's.. I use flashdrives and external drives for years now.
Not using dvd's or cd's anymore. So I can't advise for burning programms” (pdf)

I am still using the enclosure and the board of the gembird drive, but with the different drive. It works, so I've decided to just keep it. Old laptop gets the 2012 philips drive of dubious quality :3

PS. Some things i noticed in the manual:
- you see the front of the drive twice, theres an extra cd logo on the second one. (the actual drive does not have any on it, just the text "External optical drive")
- there's screenshots from windows 7 & 8

oki byee
- ace 🌸