HornetTek D-Slim : Portable DVD Drive

Article Index
HornetTek D-Slim : Portable DVD Drive

Pictures & Testing
Conclusion
All Pages

HornetTek has made a very cool/sleek looking, ultra-portable DVD Drive. Is it easy to use? Does it perform well? Is it as awesome as it looks? Keep reading to find out!

About HornetTek

As one of the leading peripheral enclosure solution provider, HornetTek specializes in Storage and Multimedia External Enclosure solutions and we constantly offers state-of-the-art design of hard disk enclosure to provide user-friendly peripherals to consumers at all ranges.

HornetTek is a global peripheral enclosure provider with manufacturing facility located in China since 1999. We deliver high quality standard products at competitive price in which provide our customers has an excellent opportunity to be successful in the competitive International Enclosure marketplace.

Our reputation, experience, keen industry insight and power of direct manufacturing allowed us to surpass OEM and ODM requirements and provide our customers with superb value, high-quality-in-demand products.

Our R&D engineering team is accustomed to form a standard yet efficient new product development procedure to satisfy timely requirement from the market and with our experts on delivering the freshest technologies available. We are always in tune to what is hot in the market place by creating innovation product with competitive price value.

Overall, we will achieve our mission through excellence in product design, factory manufacturing and customer service.

Specifications

Features

Accommodates Slim type CD-R, CD-RW, DVD-R and DVD-RW
8X DVD+R, 8X DVD+RW, 8X DVD-R, 6X DVD-RW, 5X DVD-RAM, 8X DVD-ROM
24X CD-R, 24X CD-RW, 24X CD-ROM
Hot swappable, plug and play
Operates at High (480Mbps) or Full (12Mbps) speed.
System Works with PC and MAC.
Material: Rigid Aluminum, internal metal tray
Slim design, light weight
Rigid Aluminum, internal metal tray
High efficient power saving modes no power adapter required
USB Power (No power adapter required for optical drives)

Now, on to the goodies!

Pictures

Here we have the front of the box.

Back of the box.

Here's everything that came with the D-Slim DVD Drive. USB power/connection cable, user manual, Nero 7 Essentials(AWESOME!), and of course the drive itself. So far everything's looking great, including the drive.

I really like there logo, so I took a close-up!

Here's where you would plug in the USB cable. This is on the direct opposite side of where the drive opens.

Here you have the top part where the drive pops out and you can insert your disks.

Kind of a fugly picture, but it gets the point across. The bottom is my ASUS 900 Netbook and on top is the D-Slim drive.

This is the last picture I have for you. Again, showing the size of this drive in comparison to my netbook.

Testing

For testing, I compared the HornetTek D-Slim drive to the Super Writemaster drive in my main rig since I don't have any other portable DVD drives, and the net book, obviously, doesn't have one built in.

The benchmark used for testing out the speeds of these two drives was Nero Disc Speed. Nero Disc Speed tested everything in one run, and also is the top disk drive benching program out there at this time, as far as I know.

MY RIG:

Motherboard	EVGA x58 3x SLI
CPU	Intel Core i7 920 @ 3.6GHz
Memory	6GB OCZ Platinum 1600
GPU	Diamond 4890
HDD	Western Digital 640GB
PSU	In-Win Commander 1200W
Cooling	TRUE 120

Results

HornetTek D-Slim

Super Writemaster

First off, I would like to explain two things:

The graphs are different because the benchmark wasn't behaving while testing the Super Writemaster. Nero Disc Speed only tested .75GB of the DVD vs. the D-Slim tested 2.11GB. This doesn't affect the results, however, because the Super Writemaster had topped out its speed at 7.67x, and didn't ever go any faster.
The portable drive is meant to be just that, portable. The speeds is put out were very impressive, and to add to that, I can almost fit it into my pocket. So, just because the stationary, SATA drive was faster doesn't make the D-Slim a bad product by any means.

I was very impressed by these results. and was only planning on seeing the D-Slim be probably half as fast as my SRM. It's very clear that HornetTek spent a great deal of time on this product judging by ONLY the speeds. The great looks and amazing portability just add to the fact. While it did use quite a bit more CPU power, it wasn't enough to complain about considering the CPU usage is based off of a single core, and I have 4, so that's pretty good.

Conclusion

The HornetTek D-Slim Portable DVD Drive is an amazing portable solution to those with netbooks and laptops that don't have built in drives. It doesn't even weigh the same amount as my netbook, so carrying it around in you laptop bag or briefcase is a very pliable solution to your no dvd drive woes. Hooking up via USB cable, this drive is a very simple plug and play piece of hardware. You can plug it into any computer with a USB 2.0 port, which is practically every computer you see nowadays. On top of the fact that it's a great portable solution, it also looks great. The very sleek design that HornetTek chose for this looks amazing.

Speeds, you would think, would be an issue with a portable drive, but that's not true in this case. The HornetTek D-Slim's speeds are almost up to what you would see from your desktop computer.

The only bad thing I have seen about this drive is the price. Although I don't think it's reached the big retailers yet, the only site I found with it for sale was Meritline.com and I've never heard of them. They had it for $64.99 and are one of HornetTek's resellers. This price is comparable to the other big names in the industry such as Samsung and I personally like the look of the D-Slim better, so although that seems high to me, it is very reasonable for the market.

Pros: