So my "USB 3" external DVD drive died

[kennethk]

The RW part stopped working on my USB external DVD drive the one time I actually needed it, out of curiosity I took it apart come to find it's being powered by a mini USB control board, can this even be considered USB 3 by using a mini USB control board or did china just lie to me? 

 

[Senzelian]

That's how all of them essentially work. You have a USB to SATA adapter and the drive itself is connected via SATA.

[manikyath]

wel.. if you wonder if it's usb 3.0 -- does it actually have more than 4 connection points in the usb connector?

 

ps: i love the huge label over the 'obviously an off the shelf sata slim DVD drive' saying it's defenately a usb drive

[kennethk]

1 minute ago, Senzelian said:

That's how all of them essentially work. You have a USB to SATA adapter and the drive itself is connected via SATA.

I would've figured you'd at least need micro usb to achieve the USB 3 title

[Kilrah]

There is no USB3 external optical drive that I know of, the fastest DVD drive there is won't even saturate USB2 (16x is just 20MB/s) so it's pointless to use a more expensive USB3 adapter board. A fast internal blu-ray drive could benefit but it's likely a "laptop" drive won't even read one fast enough either anyway.

 

So yeah they'll have lied to you as in "works with a USB3 port". Or they did mention USB3 because you should use a USB3 port just for the higher power supply ability.

[BondiBlue]

It wouldn't really matter even if it did use a USB 3 controller. A laptop optical drive like that won't be fast enough to need more than a USB 2 connection. 

[kennethk]

21 minutes ago, Kilrah said:

There is no USB3 external optical drive that I know of, the fastest DVD drive there is won't even saturate USB2 (16x is just 20MB/s) so it's pointless to use a more expensive USB3 adapter board. A fast internal blu-ray drive could benefit but it's likely a "laptop" drive won't even read one fast enough either anyway.

 

So yeah they'll have lied to you as in "works with a USB3 port". Or they did mention USB3 because you should use a USB3 port just for the higher power supply ability.

Fooled again by the blue connector.

[demonix00]

3 hours ago, Kilrah said:

Or they did mention USB3 because you should use a USB3 port just for the higher power supply ability.

More then likely that since the USB2 Asus external DVD drive I have requires 2 USB ports more then likely because one connector can't supply all the power the drive needs.