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lineon dvd drive 1

The Lite-On eTAU208 DVD/CD Writer is a portable disc drive that’s pretty handy for folks who like to travel light. Not only is the DVD burner barely any wider than an optical disc, it also weighs just 0.77 pounds. And it draws power from you’re computer’s USB port, which means there’s no extra power cable to lug around.

The folks at Lite-On sent me a demo unit to review, and so far it seems to perform exactly as described. One thing I really like is that the disc burner comes with a short USB cable that can be tucked into a slot on the bottom of the disc drive for easy storage. It took a little bit of effort to cram the USB cable into place, but it sure beats misplacing the cable or having yet another separate item to throw in your bag.

When you plug the disc drive into a PC, it should be recognized almost immediately. If you want to shut down the drive while it’s still plugged in, just hit the Stop button and it will power down. You can power it up again by opening and closing the lid.

I was also pleased to note that when I plugged the disc drive with an HP Mini 5101 and powered up the netbook I was able to hit F9 and choose the eTAU208 from the boot options menu, which means that you don’t need to wait for your operating system to load before your PC will recognize the drive.

Lite-On ships the disc drive with Nero 8 Essentials disc burning software for Windows and Linux.

On the down side, the disc drive has a cheap plastic feel to it, but that’s probably because it is made of cheap plastic. But that’s also one of the reasons it’s so light weight.

The Lite-On eTAU208 has a list price of $64.99, but you can pick it up from Newegg for $49.99 + free shipping. You can check out some unboxing photos after the break.

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6 replies on “First look at the Lite-On eTAU208 USB DVD burner”

  1. This is old news. Here in Taiwan, I bought an LG GSA-50N slim DVD burner which is the slightly larger than this model in April 2008. It also transfers data and is powered by a single USB connection. The bottom of the unit states it was manufactured in January 2008. The only added benefit of this new unit is the cable slot.

  2. I took a look at the photos on Newegg. Does it really plug into only one USB port? While that’s much less worrying for the laptop than those wacky Y-forked USB cables (to get power from two ports), I can’t help but wonder if that is really enough power to reliably operate the drive. Would be quite wonderful if it were so, though.

    1. Yup, that’s how it works. I haven’t tested it extensively yet, but it seemed
      to recognize several discs without any problems this morning. I’ll let you
      know if it fails under heavier loads.

  3. This looks perfect for my netbook. It can be a real pain in the toosh to get a cd or dvd to convert to USB all the time. It would be nice to have a really portable solution like this.

    The last few you’ve posted on here have been nice, but the need for power or the clunkyness of the drive was usually a turn off. The price is right too. $50 from newegg…just can’t really beat that…

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