LG Electronics WH16NS40 16X Blu-ray/DVD/CD Multi compatible Internal SATA Rewriter Drive, BDXL, M-DISC Support, Black

As I write this review, Amazon is currently not offering this drive for sale themselves and only has it available via resellers.If your only question is "Is this drive reliable for writing to CD/DVD/BD/BD-XL discs?" then the answer is "Yes". If your question is "Can this drive have the firmware downgraded to UHD friendly firmware for ripping?" then the answer is also "Yes", but you're not going to like what I had to do to accomplish this.This drive shipped to me with firmware version 1.05, which is encrypted and is not considered to be "UHD friendly" for ripping UHD discs. Please note that I can't guarantee you that if you buy this drive and follow my directions that you will have success downgrading the firmware. I have over 30 years of IT work experience and I still had problems downgrading the firmware.First I tried using the SDFtool program that MakeMKV recommended. It failed. It did start up, but it displayed weirdly, not looking much like it was supposed to, although it did try to patch the LG drive. It failed with some kind of weird 5-6 digit hex error code. I didn't write down the code because there is no way to look up the code and see what it means. Not sure what the writer of SDFtool was thinking of in having it display this kind of error code. Then I did some internet searching and one guy swore that you couldn't use the graphical SDFTool but if you did command line patching instead, it would work. It didn't. Generated a different 5-6 digit hex code for failure. I checked and the firmware remained on 1.05. At this point I am running out of options, so I found that DVDFab says it can patch the firmware for you, but the tool to do so costs about $100. Sigh. I bought a package of this tool and UHD ripping software and hoped for the best. And spent a lot more than $100 on said package. On my first attempt to patch, it did start and seemed to run OK without generating an error code but the program became a run away and never ended. After 30 minutes I tried everything I could to cancel the program and nothing worked. I even tried throwing the power switch on LG drive and the program still refused to stop. DVDFab documentation said it should only take 2-3 minutes to patch. So I forced a hardware interrupt and rebooted my PC. At this point I think the LG drive was actually successfully patched, but I forgot to check, so I ran the DVDFab patching program again. Same response - it started and after 2-3 minutes it ran away, never to end. I left it alone for 30 more minutes and forced another hardware interrupt/reboot. At this point I remembered to check the firmware and it was downgraded to 1.02. The drive has worked flawlessly since the downgrade and can rip UHD discs successfully to my hard drive. Note that I used Vantec external device enclosures with a power supply on my BD drives. Some people have reported having problems changing firmware on BD drives in Vantec enclosures, but it did work OK for me. If you're not sure if paying this money to DVDFab and trying this is for you, MakeMKV does list some resellers who downgrade firmware on drives they sell. This drive has done everything I need it to do so I do recommend buying it.

Added this to an older desktop tower in addition to an existing DVD drive to give it a new lease of life as a media server. Simple installation, fits perfectly and have yet to find a disc it won't play (scratched up coasters an exception). For some reason the firmware that comes installed on this unit removes the ability to play HD Bluray but curious, persistent and courageous owners will find ways around this. Totally unrelated, you can flash the firmware with the correct software for this drive. Fair warning - doing so may invalidate any warranty and doing it incorrectly could brick your drive. Built as well or better than every disc drive I've ever installed, and I've installed a few. Would recommend.

Optical disk drives have been around for a long time. This one was purchased to replace an earlier model from LG that had failed after many years of good service.I can say that it does a good job of reading CDs, DVDs, and Blu-Ray disks. Also writing to DVDs.I haven't tried writing to CDs or Blu-Ray, and I don't have any experience with M-Disks.It can get a little loud if it is reading or writing at a furious pace. But it is dead silent if you're playing a disk in real time.

Hardware is as advertised/hoped for as I was upgrading a new-built computer (son built, I added) to be able to play my DVD/BluRay's.Some difficulty finding the right software to run with the drive and play my DVD/BluRay, but the Leawo Blu-Ray app seems to work just fine with my Windows 11 system. This could have been easier.

This model has been around for at least ten years and for good reason, they work great and are fair priced. It looks like they might be discontinued soon as they are getting hard to find. I bought a spare just in case.

Excelente, llego antes de lo programado y funciona perfectamente bien.

Amazon didn't have any brand new LG BLU-RAY burners in stock, but they did have some used ones from their refurbished department do I decided to get. I figured if it didn't work or was having issues it'd be easier to return it to Amazon for a refund since they were on the ones that sold and shipped it. When I got it the burner was in great shape and when I tested the burner it worked fine without any odds noises or other issues. I don't play BLU-RAY disks the most, but now I have something that I can play CDs, DVDs and BLU-RAY disks. I can also burn disks and copy my original disks so they stay in good shape. If you use a program like DVDFab you can downgrade your firmware to make this drive 4k friendly. Using this drive unlocked with a program like MakeMVK you can copy literally any disk format.

Works as expected, but my Blu-Ray software player (WinDVD) still doesn’t play my Blu-Ray DVDs, which I hoped this new drive could fix.