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?
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.
I heard of MakeMKV before, thing is that I generally don’t buy blu-rays because of the downright horrible DRM schemes.
if DRM makes it harder for me to enjoy the content I bought and paid for (this includes limiting me to some lowres garbage even though my system is more than capable of playing HD and FHD video) compared to what I would get if I were to pirate it then it’s a problem of distribution; not one of morality.
you will always have some group that pirates your content no matter what; but if buying gives me a worse product because of artificial restrictions put on it I can’t give any less of a shit.
there’s very few streaming platforms that even give me a decent option (and I don’t even properly own my library; all I get is a license to watch/listen to something, one that could be revoked at any time in the future without me being able to do anything except complain about it).
Removed by mod
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.
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.
