Gear Head Triple Format Mobile Slim External DVD Drive 1
The Gear Head External Mobile Slim DVD Drive (Model: 8XDVDEXT)

The Gear Head External Mobile Slim DVD Drive (Model: 8XDVDEXT)

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Hi everyone,

Today, we will be seeing an old product from Gear Head. It is an External Slim DVD Drive, model 8XDVDEXT.

Gear Head Triple Format Mobile Slim External DVD Drive 1

This drive is able to burn CD’s at a maximum speed of 24X, DVD+/-R(W) at up to 8x, DVD+/-R DL at up to 6x and DVD-RAM (Now discontinued) at up to 5x.

Gear Head Triple Format Mobile Slim External DVD Drive 2

This product has already been used a while back, but I just found it recently while cleaning. I no longer have the Nero 9 disc, but that’s fine since I currently use the 2017 version of that software.

Gear Head Triple Format Mobile Slim External DVD Drive 3

When we first open the box, we have the drive inside. On the side, we have the USB cable. It is a USB “Y” cable to Mini USB:

Gear Head Triple Format Mobile Slim External DVD Drive 4

We also have the user manual too:

Gear Head Triple Format Mobile Slim External DVD Drive 5

The drive appearance is that it is technically a drive inside a USB enclosure:

Gear Head Triple Format Mobile Slim External DVD Drive 6

The drive use a Mini USB connector and also has a barrel connector for a 5V DC adapter:

Gear Head Triple Format Mobile Slim External DVD Drive 7

Here’s the drive mechanism:

Gear Head Triple Format Mobile Slim External DVD Drive 8

The Optical Pickup Unit (OPU) is very similar to that of my Samsung SN-208AB drive. In fact, here are both drives side-by-side:

  • LiteOn DS-8A5S and Samsung SN-208AB 1
  • LiteOn DS-8A5S and Samsung SN-208AB 2

The Samsung drive always moves its OPU to the end as it triggers the eject mechanism. The Gear Head drive keeps it on the initial position.

When we plug the drive to the PC, it identifies it as a Slimtype DVD A DS8A5S. This actually means the drive is a Lite-On drive! They used the ATAPI name for their desktop drives and the Slimtype name for the laptop drives. Newer drives simply starts with PLDS. Lite-On names their slim drive models with DS- being used for internal slim 12.7mm drives and DU- being used for internal slim 9.5mm drives.

Here we can see this particular drive capabilities:

LiteOn DS-8A5S capabilities

As expected, it can read and burn CDs and DVDs. This adds another drive to my current collection. This also means I’ll be using this drive frequently as Lite-On has been one of my favorite brands for DVD drives for years. Even my Lite-On iHAS524 is going strong even after some laser swaps.

As usual, I’ll do burning tests later, but for now this concludes this post. The drive seems to be performing as expected. That OPU unit used in this drive is of good quality based on my use of the Samsung drive which seem to use the same or similar OPU.

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