I’m looking for a disk drive that works with linux, connects via USB-A, and is compatible with CDs and DVDs (blu-ray would be good but it isn’t necessary). Does anybody have any recomendations?
I use a Verbatim DPAA to access old DVD’s. Cheap and simple, works just fine with both Windows and Linux and didn’t even have to install any drivers on either.
Connector is USB-B mini (disk drive) to USB-A (computer).
Sadly doesn’t support blu-ray.
Aren’t all of them working due to standardization? I mean, you can boot from them like you would from a USB stick.
Yes. Any one from Amazon will work. There are several Blueray ones; I believe I’ve even seen BD writers.
OP might be talking about something they can watch DVDs and Blueray disks on, though; in that case it might be more complex. I don’t know if BD DRM complicates things.
Most dvd’s should be fine as VLC can play almost any of them.
BD is where things get complicated because of DRM, expect almost none of them to work thanks to big corpo telling us what we can and can’t do with something you bought and paid for (sadly enough streaming doesn’t get much better either)
MakeMKV should help with this but if you want to read 4k blu rays, you need to choose carefully what drive you buy, because getting those to work can be a pain in the ass.
CD/DVD any cheap 30€ drive should work. If you want something serious you can buy an internal bluray drive like this one and some case adapter from sata do USB and use it that way.
A lot of USB disc drives work just fine on Linux nowadays, and it’s a matter of what features you want/need, really. I have a pretty expensive Pioneer Blu-Ray writer that connects via Type C, but I needed the extra features at the time so I went for that.
