Many new laptops now come without an optical drive built-in, and that’s fine if you no longer have a need to play music or movies from DVDs, install software that’s distributed on discs, or back up your data onto blank writable DVDs.

But what if you still need access to an optical drive on occasion?

The easiest way to solve this problem is to purchase an inexpensive external USB optical drive. Just like external USB hard drives, these drives simply plug into an open USB port, allowing you to do everything you could do with an internal optical drive without the burden of the extra weight.

I recently had the opportunity to check out the Pawtec External USB 3.0 Aluminum 8X DVD-RW Optical Drive (#ad), and I really like it. [Read more…]