ASUS Announces ZenDrive V1M, a New External DVD Burner

Tsing

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Image: ASUS



ASUS is reminding hardware enthusiasts that disc-based storage remains alive and well with one its latest announcements, the ZenDrive V1M, an external DVD drive and writer. Featuring a built-in cable-storage design and black finish, ASUS’ ZenDrive V1M can be connected via USB-C, making it a good complement for modern ultraslim laptops that lack disc drives. Users will also find support for M-DISC (Millennial Disc), a type of single-write optical disc that can safely store data for 1,000 years.









ZenDrive V1M (SDRW-08V1M-U) (ASUS)



Convenient cable storage: No more losses with a built-in 24cm connecting cable.USB-C interface: Perfect companion for latest-generation ultraslim laptops.M-DISC support: Store your precious...
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I mean... that device does have a use... but we've become so integrated with always on remote connections for working documents stored on the cloud that vendors are selling more small storage based laptops than they are for laptops with a terabyte plus of storage.

My workspace gives engineers and developers 256 gig storage and tells us to shuffle everything we don't need constantly off to the cloud via one drive.
 
I ~just~ bought a USB drive for the mother-in-law. We built her computer 2 years ago, a week ago she starts bitching because it didn't have a DVD drive. The first time in 2 years she thinks to use one, and now her world has ended because I didn't put one in the case that she picked out that didn't have any 5 1/4" bays...
 
usb c 1 cable is nice, my externals use 2 usb a ports. But man I cannot even remember the last time I plugged one in, probably during my big dvd ripping project to plex 10 years ago. I still have an external BR drive on the plex server but it has been many months since I touched a physical disc.

But, there must be some market for this for Asus to design the unique case and produce it....
 
Burticus said:
usb c 1 cable is nice, my externals use 2 usb a ports. But man I cannot even remember the last time I plugged one in, probably during my big dvd ripping project to plex 10 years ago. I still have an external BR drive on the plex server but it has been many months since I touched a physical disc.

But, there must be some market for this for Asus to design the unique case and produce it....
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Honestly it's probably to keep new product in the market with parts availability everyone is using the "Lets make old **** new again" method.
 
Grimlakin said:
Honestly it's probably to keep new product in the market with parts availability everyone is using the "Lets make old **** new again" method.
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Sure.... and I'm sure they will sell some regardless.
 
The only use of a DVD writer at this point is in the professional / enterprise sphere to officially submit / deliver data. It is cheap and read-only.
 
Am I missing something? Why is this news? These things have been commodities forever. I ahve had a $30 USB optical writer in my closet for close to a decade. I rarely ever use it anymore.
 
Zarathustra said:
Am I missing something? Why is this news? These things have been commodities forever. I ahve had a $30 USB optical writer in my closet for close to a decade. I rarely ever use it anymore.
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It's only interesting because Asus went out of their way to design a modern USB C one and a custom case. Everyone else still sells usb 2.0 drives....
 
Burticus said:
It's only interesting because Asus went out of their way to design a modern USB C one and a custom case. Everyone else still sells usb 2.0 drives....
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That's nice I guess, but even the fastest 24x DVD drives are only ~33MB/s.

As infrequently as one of these is going to get used (let's face it , They are going to sit in a drawer or a cabinet collecting dust most of the time) sacrificing the some 20% drive speed that using USB2 implies really isn't a deal breaker.

At least not to me.
 
It's been a looong time since I looked at optical drives, especially external ones, but from the pic it seems to me that this external optical drive does not have a separate power cable/AC adapter. It uses the USB-C connection for both data and power, which to me already makes this a lot more convenient than the external drives I am used to. So that's handy I guess. Retractable cord that stores in the case is convenient, I'll give it that. Seems easy to carry around in a laptop bag or your pocket or whatever. What these things will end up doing is sitting in a drawer or closet for years until they randomly get needed for something, then back to their sleeping place they go.

I remember in my younger days when I would burn of ton of CDs, and later DVDs, just to store all my stuff. Grab big spools of blank discs on sale and just run through 'em. I had several optical disc storage binders overflowing with discs. Then at some point storage just got so cheap on a per-GB basis. Massive space on HDDs and USB flash drives. Then we also started using NASes and sh1t. There was no longer any real use for optical discs of any kind. Maybe once in a very long while, a situation would come up. I did have one client in the last two years specifically request an optical drive for his new PC, so that was interesting. Been a looooong time since I built a PC with an optical drive. Can't tell you what he uses it for, I got no idea.

Ironically, my current PC case has two optical drives in it. A DVD burner carried over from my previous X58 system which usually refuses to open the tray, and a BD burner I got as a berfday gift at some point in the last several years. Yyyeeeaaahhh have you seen the cost of blank blu-rays? Definitely never gonna end up burning one of those. I also heard burning a BD is gawd-awful slow. I certainly don't use my PC's optical drives for watching movies. Back during the brief time when I did use discs for movies, I would watch them on a console (usually PS3). I kept my media on an external HDD before I moved to using a NAS. Most music CDs I own were ripped to FLAC years ago.

These days, my use of discs is limited to 7th-gen-and-earlier consoles. Even then, you can usually avoid having to use discs. I load Wii games from a USB HDD attached to the system. I plan to replace my dead PS2 optical drive with one of those SD card reader drives. There's probably something like that for Dreamcast, but I still burn games for that (though I haven't in ages). I need to get an SD-card-to-Gamecube-memory-card-slot adapter for that system. Original Xbox came with an 8GB IDE/PATA HDD you could replace with a much bigger one when you modded the system, so you could just load games off of that. If you mod a PS3 or X360, again you can just load games off the HDD. On PC I was using No-CD/No-DVD cracks during the days when retail games came on discs, and not as f*cking digital download codes. I guess I do still use discs for Saturn games though.

My previous PC case (used from 2006 to 2014) had a floppy drive in it. I kept it in there, long after motherboards stopped supporting floppy drives. 2 or 3 computers went by, and that thing was still sitting in there. Actually, it might still be in that case. The case was gutted and put in storage long ago, but the floppy drive might still be in it. Now tell me, does anyone make a USB-C floppy drive?
 
MadMummy76 said:
When writable CD-s came out they said they'd last a hundred years.
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The ones I kept in my car for like 15-20 years definitely didn't last that long. Got scratched, got warped by heat, discolored by sunlight, data layer peeled off on some, and my car's CD player would make discs get really hot, which would cause burned ones to become unreadable until they cooled down. And it's not like these discs were loose and flinging all around the car. They were in a sun-visor binder that I kept in the back seat (didn't attach to the sun visor cuz it stopped me from using the visor's mirror). I don't recall what brand these discs were, I know there were a bunch of different ones, and yeah there was probably some cheap-o CompUSA-branded ones in that mix. But none of them, regardless of brand or cost, lasted. They all ended up with similar damage. Even after I stopped using discs and used MP3 player then phones, I kept those discs in the car. I just forgot they existed. I did finally remove them from the car in the past two years. They need to be thrown out/recycled.

I never did believe that 100-year claim. Now they say 1,000 years for M-Disc? How in the f*ck could they possibly know that? There is no way to test that, so how can they make such a claim?
 
DrezKill said:
I never did believe that 100-year claim. Now they say 1,000 years for M-Disc? How in the f*ck could they possibly know that? There is no way to test that, so how can they make such a claim?
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IT's very similar to when an astrologist says there are twenty billion to the power of twenty billion starts in a galaxy, or twenty billion to the power of twenty billion galaxies.

The number is so vast and the ability to properly catalog and count the data doesn't exist so people just go... "Wow that's a lot" and ignore the data.

They say it'll last a thousand years so some people will bury themselves with their prized data and some future civilization will find it and wonder who bothers to write with light.
 
DrezKill said:
I remember in my younger days when I would burn of ton of CDs, and later DVDs, just to store all my stuff. Grab big spools of blank discs on sale and just run through 'em. I had several optical disc storage binders overflowing with discs.
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You and me both brother. I still have spindles half used up under my desk collecting dust. And the giant 256 disc Case Logic binders that cost a ton and you couldn't give them away now. I haven't burned anything outside of a bootable rescue dvd for what seems like forever.
 
Zarathustra said:
As infrequently as one of these is going to get used (let's face it , They are going to sit in a drawer or a cabinet collecting dust most of the time) sacrificing the some 20% drive speed that using USB2 implies really isn't a deal breaker.
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It isn’t for speed, it’s so you don’t have to use an adapter. Or two, since some externals have dual USB for power
 
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