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.

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.

I've used LG drives for decades, highly recommended.

Well, this isn't a fancy piece of tech and no one would jump in joy for the sight of an optical drive these days. It just does its job and does it well. I bought it several years ago and so far had no issues.If you buy an optical drive in the 2020s it makes no sense to buy a DVD drive and not pay those few extra bucks and get a Blu-Ray drive instead. This drive is really not expensive and will allow you to watch HD movies on your PC, as well as burn BD-R discs with up to 50GB of storage on a single disc. It is, of course, backwards compatible with both CD and DVD for both reading and writing."Easy to install" gets 3/5 just because it's an internal drive and you will need to open the computer's case to install it, however that goes for any internal drive, it's not like this specific model has a different installation method. Also note that many newer computer cases don't have 5.25'' drive bays anymore, so make sure your computer has one before you order any internal drive.A few extra things that aren't part of the official specs but would be interesting for some:Pros:* Reads Playstation 3 discs - One of the very few models that is able to ready original PS3 game discs. If you happen to have a PS3 with a broken drive, you can use this to create ISOs of said games on your computer.* Can be flashed with LibreDrive firmware and used with MakeMKV or AnyDVD HD to read UHD movies. Note that this would probably void your warranty.Cons:* No bitsetting support for DVD+R - That could be an issue if you have an old standalone DVD player that refuses to play burned discs. Bitsetting is a method to fool such players into thinking that a DVD+R disc is a pressed DVD-ROM, but unfortunately this drive doesn't support it, even with firmware updates.

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.

Installed this drive on a Windows 11 system and it worked flawlessly. If you don't see it on your drives list, just put a disc in it and it will appear. I was able to use it with MakeMKV and followed the instructions to downgrade the firmware so that it can be used to rip my 4K discs.

No surprise here. I had hoped it might work on the XP side of my PC, but I knew it likely would only work on the Windows 7 side. XP doesn’t even recognize the drive. Keep in mind that Windows 7 and newer don’t show an optical drive if there is no media in it. So if it doesn’t appear on the GUI after install, try inserting any optical disc into it. Bought this to burn Blu-Ray discs, and it has performed adequately. It doesn’t come with software, so you may have to buy software to read Blu-Ray media as older software might only read DVD formats. LG makes solid hardware, so I’m confident I will be quite happy with this product.

Good unit. Running my old discs for nostalgia...