We love that modern laptops have become so slim and light, but we aren’t happy about the disappearance of ports and features. It’s been forever since I’ve seen a laptop with an optical disc drive! If ...

Optical drives are still practical for many users, whether to play old CDs and DVDs, install software, or create backups—especially with modern laptops, which are usually supplied without a drive.

This is a “why didn’t I think of that?” idea. [Alec] needed a way to connect an IDE DVD drive using USB. Rather than order a connector he pulled the circuit board out of an old USB hard drive ...

Seemingly out of nowhere, Toshiba has started shipping the PA3530U-1HD1, an external USB 2.0 HD DVD drive. It’s not even all that expensive, either, appearing on online stores like Newegg for $370.

Velocity Micro is a combination 500GB hard drive, DVD-ROM, memory card reader, and 3-port USB hub. We got our hands on it at CES and were impressed with the soft-touch finish and solid build quality.

Portable USB hard drives are a great concept, but their usefulness has been curbed by the slow transfer times of USB 1.1. The Pockey-DataStor from Pocketec changes all that, using the USB 2 interface ...