Are DVD/CD burners a standard size for laptops?

[miston]

Do I have to buy my DVD burner from my laptop manufacturer or can I get one from someone else?

That is, I don't really need a DVD burner in my laptop now, but in a year or so I'm sure I would have wished I would have bought one. Will I be able to find one easily if my laptop manufacturer quits making them?

Or if I want to get one in a few months when they will be surely cheaper and faster, can I get one from say LG or Plextor or etc?

thanks

 

[Commodus]

It's a big "it depends." Some laptop manufacturers have drive bays that let you remove the drive. However, it's likely the case that those kinds of drive bays will only let you use drives that fit the manufacturer's particular bay. So you probably won't be able to buy just any drive off-the-shelf - not that there's exactly a lot of options to begin with.

The best thing you can do is simply to buy a laptop with a DVD burner built-in. You ultimately save money if you know you might want a burner later, and you don't have to gamble on whether or not there will still be drives available for your laptop later on.

 

[jmeis982]

There is also always the later option of using an external drive and getting a USB 2.0 DVD RW

 

[imported_Arden]

I am new to all of this and wondered if i have a cd that I wish to copy and my notebook...toshiba has a Cd, floppy and of course a hard drive, I presume that I will have to use the cd on my notebookd to playback the cd that I wish to copy and then by an external burner to do so. Is that how it works? Then this burner would run off my USB?
Will there ever be units like a cd player and burne together? technology is the bain of a baby boomers existence and yet a necessity of life!!!
Do I have to check with toshiba for the burner? I would only want one to duplicate cd's as I don't download music, I would leave the original at home and take the copy in the vehicle.
What is a quality burner brand???? Thanx

 

[Jeff7]

Check around at Google - maybe you can find a compatibility listing. My sister's Dell laptop used a HL-DT-ST GCC-4240N drive. Well it seems that a lot of people had trouble with this POS drive, and were waiting for a firmware update to fix some serious media compatibility and disc burning speed issues. It was billed as being able to burn up to 10x - many people, including myself, could not do 10x, and often had trouble at 4x.
At any rate, it is no longer able to even read CD's, so I got a replacement. I got a Toshiba drive - one page listed the HL-DT-ST GCC-4240N as working on Dell's 8200 laptops, but it also listed a Toshiba drive.
I unfortunately have not yet installed the drive, but the outside looks alright. I've yet to get a day set aside to dissect her laptop. Hopefully this week though. I'll post back with full results.