Dell USB Slim DVD RW Drive DW316

Last year when I visited Bangladesh, I brought the Dell USB Slim DW316 drive with me. My intention was to get in touch with some of the audio CD collectors in Bangladesh and RIP as much CD as it is humanly possible purely for archival reason. Unfortunately, the political situation in Bangladesh was not great back at that time and I had to return back to the US without any accomplishment. I came back to Bangladesh once again and this time around I am trying to get it done, at least as much as I can.

This is a USB powered DVD Re-Writable drive, so ripping simple Audio CD is not an issue at all. The drive came with an USB cable that has USB type A port version 2.0 in one end and mini USB type B port on the other. The mini B port goes to the drive itself and we can use the type A for plugging it on any computer. Making it fairly compatible with any computer that has USB type A port. Then again, I understood that this could be an issue for modern Mac computers from the get go. Using simple USB type A to C converter should help any Mac user. I am yet to try it on a Mac computer though.

The drive itself is fairly light weight and does not require any additional driver while using it on Windows platform. Entire body of this drive is made out of cheap plastic and it feels very cheap. Specially the CD tray feels a bit flimsy when removing a disc from the drive bay. So, please handle with care and don’t push it too hard to insert any disc on it. It is basically a plug and play device and power consumption is pretty low.

The specs of this drive is fairly simple but I am going to share it here regardless so that you can get an idea before you make any purchase decision.

As optical discs are continuously loosing it's ground as a storage media, I am fairly convinced that at some point it will become almost obsolete. With the growing popularity high capacity solid state drive and high speed internet connection, there would be no need of such media to store fairly small amount of data that optical discs generally holds. This is a reality now for both the software and videos games industry. Although optical discs become primarily popular as an audio and video storage medium couple of decades back, it is also changing quite fast. Although it did not go extinct entirely but it’s at the verge of that stage.

This particularly true for music industry. Major music label companies are releasing music tracks and videos on various streaming platforms. Both the Software and games are becoming available through marketplaces and they are quite easily downloadable now a days. Sadly, people are not using optical discs anymore. This global trend also affected the regions where internet speed is generally not as fast as it is in the western world.

So, if you still need a portable optical disc reader or writer to RIP your favorite Audio CDs or simply burn a CD or two, this drive should do a decent job. Just do not forget that it is not a Blu-Ray drive and it should be handled carefully.