The 3 Best External Optical Drives for DVDs and Blu-rays in 2025

We eliminated from consideration any DVD drives that cost more than $40 and any Blu-ray drives that cost more than $140, as well as any models that didn’t both read and write discs and any that had poor or few reviews on Amazon.

The Wbacon 5 in 1 External Blu-ray Drive, and the Juowoi External Blu-ray Drive are cheap Blu-ray drives popular on Amazon, but are in fact the same drive — they come in identical packaging with different stickers affixed over the barcode. Both drives posted extremely slow rip times in our tests, and their retention assemblies (the pressure-activated plates that hold optical discs in place when you close their disc trays) came unscrewed and unmounted during regular use, which could seriously damage your discs.

The Alphami External Blu-ray Drive and the Aelrsoch External Compatible Blu-ray Drive Burner are also cheap, popular drives on Amazon, and both failed our disc-ripping tests when connected to a Windows 11 PC or a M3 MacBook Pro.

The Asus BW-16D1X-U is a fairly popular drive that gets good reviews, and it supports both CDs/DVDs and Blu-rays. But it’s bulky—almost three times as thick as our picks—and upgrading the firmware is limited to Windows, which leaves Mac users out in the cold.

The Asus ZenDrive is our previous CD/DVD pick and was the quietest drive we tested, but our current pick, the Verbatim External Slimline CD/DVD Writer, handily lapped it in our rip tests. The Verbatim drive also costs less.

The Dell DW316 USB DVD Drive has more than 14,000 reviews on Amazon with an overall rating of 4.6 out of five stars, but this CD/DVD burner has a suggested retail price of $40, considerably more than our pick and the other options we tested.

The Gotega External CD/DVD Drive is an extremely popular DVD burner with a high percentage of negative reviews, largely due to reliability issues, and we’ve seen multiple reports of Amazon being unhelpful with returns.

The LG GP65NB60 Ultra Slim Portable DVD Writer was louder than the Asus ZenDrive and much slower than the Verbatim External Slimline CD/DVD Writer.

The LG SP80NB80 was a runner-up DVD drive in an older version of this guide, and it performed about the same as other LG DVD drives such as the GP65NB60. It’s a fine drive if you can find it for less than $30, but it’s usually more expensive than that, and it isn’t always available on retail sites.

LG’s WP50NB40 BD/DVD burner was a previous Blu-ray drive pick. It posted competitive results in all of our tests, but it wasn’t the best at any of them. It was also the loudest Blu-ray drive we tested, especially while we watched a Blu-ray movie. It was finicky about having two available USB ports for power, and it’s the only drive we tested that resulted in a failed burn.

Of all the drives we tested, Pioneer’s BDR-XD08UMB-S external BD/DVD drive posted the worst Blu-ray rip times. On the flip side, it was the fastest by a nose at burning both DVDs and Blu-ray discs, and was the fastest BD/DVD drive at ripping DVDs.

The Roofull USB-C External CD/DVD Drive is very popular and boasts a high number of positive buyer reviews, but it doesn’t cost much less than our DVD pick, and it doesn’t have a detachable cable.

Andrew Cunningham contributed additional reporting to this guide.

This guide was edited by Caitlin McGarry and Signe Brewster.