Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #97602 in Consumer Electronics
• Brand: Hewlett-Packard
• Model: HEWC9629A

Customer Reviews

Always reliable
This drive has worked well consistently since Oct 2001 with daily personal use. I have no indication that it won't continue to perform well in the future.

now that it's been discontinued...
Of course, mine waited almost 6 months to die permanently, and has always had problems writing CDRs that my other players and drives could read reliably. HP is perfectly willing to fix it for me, assuming I can dig out the receipts, but I'll still be out the drive for the time to send it in and hope it comes back working and it will STILL be a piece of junk. How annoying.

And even these days, how often do you see a product that vanishes in under a year from release, at least a product like this with some demand...?

No end of frustration
After about two months using this drive it started having problems recognizing that there was a CD in the tray, it just plain wouldn't spin up. I'd have to open and close the tray several times until FINALLY it would spin up. It was hard to tell whether it was software or hardware that was causing the difficulties. I had upgraded the software off their webpage, and updated some windows/intel chip software stuff, and it started working again for about a month. Then, back to the old problem, again. Since I wasn't using it very much from the third month on I didn't figure it was worth my time to exercise the warrantee. Go figure, about two months after the 1 year warantee expired, it stopped working completely, no more CD spinning up. The orange light in the front would do its error blinking with or without a CD in the drive, it is dead. Arrrgh. I've burned no more than 60 CD's (I counted, not just an estimate), watched about 20 DVDs, and have read about 150 CD's worth including music CDs on this drive. That is PATHETIC. I have another drive that is just CD-R, and it is now five years old, without a hitch or a hiccup. I highly recommend that people stear clear of this drive as its mechanical loading mechanism and CD recognition appears to be prone to failure.