VicTop Ultra-Slim USB 2.0 External DVD RW Drive Review

Drive Plugged Into A MacBook Air

This review appears in its original form here, and is for this product listing.

Five Stars

Lovely little drive, speedy and quiet, perfect for macs.

The item came well packaged, in a solid, retail printed protective box, with the drive (held securely in a moulded plastic holder) and basic information sheet included inside. It was good to find that the drive requires only the single built in USB cable, rather than two cables, but it’s a shame that the cable is attached permanently, so you can’t swap it out for a longer one of your own, as this is very short… It’s a very small unit, barely larger than a disc in width and depth, with the height being very low profile.

I love the silver colour and white cable, as it fits perfectly with a MacBook Air. The plastic protective sleeve around the USB plug moulding is also very reminiscent of Apple. Normally, when you insert a disc into a drive like this, it’s drawn in after an inch or two, it was interesting to find that this took you putting the disc almost all the way into the drive until it was accepted. At this point, the disc was pulled in, and started spinning. The drive is surprisingly light, and I expected it to go spinning about the desk, but the rubber foot seemed to keep it in place. It was recognised immediately in Windows 8.1 and Mac OSX, no “unsigned driver” issues or anything that might cause a problem with real plug and play.

I found it very odd that there is no eject button on this drive – you have to eject discs using the operating system. This is not a problem though, and it really adds to the sleek looks of the drive. The drive has the appearance of brushed metal, but is actually all plastic. I suspect this helps with the light weight, but it looks really good. The drive is very quiet in use, compared to other external drives that I’ve tried, and reading data happens very quickly.

Note that this drive is USB 2.0, so can never be as quick as a USB 3.0 drive, but 176Mb of mixed media burned at 24x to CD in 3 minutes and 12 seconds. All the files were perfectly readable afterwards, and the file count and sizes matched. 2.72GB of mixed video files burned at 8x (to 16x DVD-R discs) in 8 minutes and 39 seconds. Again, the file sizes and numbers matched, and everything was readable.

I think this is an awesome little drive, that’s especially perfect for sitting alongside an Apple computer – highly recommended.

I initially received a faulty unit, but when I informed the suppliers, VicTop, they immediately sent out a replacement device, after asking some basic questions to confirm that I’d been using it correctly. I have dealt with VicTop before, and they’ve always been very friendly and helpful.

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Thanks to VicTop for providing this item at a discount for review.

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The Zoo Keeper


By TheZooKeeper

An Azure Cloud Architect with a background in messaging and infrastructure (Wintel). Bearded dog parent who likes chocolate, doughnuts and Frank's RedHot sauce, but has not yet attempted to try all three in combination!

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