Portable mobility has always been a rather hot subject for most users. We all want portable devices that make our life easier especially when you have to store your important data upon them. While storage has shift another root from optical storage, there are many users who wish to have an external optical drive (USB powered) for those last minute backups.

With the recent review of the HLDS PortableDVD that brings a new proposal at the market for 2020-2021, we searched around Amazon to see what other solutions are available to users. To our surprise we found many drives sold with very good users feedback, mainly from unknown to us manufacturers so we had to chase this down to see what users can expect from the so called "popula/best sellersr" external USB recorders. We ordered from Amazon.com many drives with the intention to see what is this all fuss about and test them properly, the way we know and you trust. After several days we had in our labs 8 external USB powered devices to test, compare and decide which one is the best and which one you should trust & buy.

Lets meet our contestants and we start with the Haiway External ODD&HDD Device.

The first drive we bought comes with the name HAIWAY and has no product number. We liked the white plastic shell. The connection cable (USB3.0 cable) is placed at the bottom of the case, which makes it convenient for travel warriors not to have to carry extra cables or loose them..

Opening the drive gives us an idea of the internal slim drive being used. In our case, the Haiway External ODD&HDD Device is based upon TSSTcorp TS-633C optical disc drive and has been manufactured....July 2010.

The adapter for SATA->USB cable is being used in most other Chinese external drives enclosures. The main chipset is the Initio Corporation INIC-1618L. Reading from the product specification paper "....The INIC-1618 provides an advanced solution to connect SATA devices to USB Host with integrated CPU and embedded SRAM/ROM. To provide high performance and cost effective solution, the INIC-1618 integrates USB-PHY, Mass Storage Class Bulk-Only USB function, SATA link/PHY core and microprocessor into a single ASIC. The INIC-1618 provides the data transfer rate of up to 60 MB/sec connecting to a 1.5G SATA interface. USB 1.1 and USB 2.0 compliant..."

This bridge chip supports only USB 2.0 so in order to promote the drive as "USB3.0" they just added a "USB 3.0 cable" into that circuit board... 

Connecting the drive with the PC we can see more details about the drive it self. The installed firmware is TF20 and even we searched around the internet we could 't find a "newer" firmware. The FirmwareHQ has several other firmware, however we are not very sure that can be used, even they all have older dates than our drive.

As was expected the HAIWAY brand name doesn't return anything over www.google.com so you wont get much support either, only direct from the Amazon seller.

As was expected, despite the fact that the drive is advertised as USB3.0 (and has the corresponding cable), in reality its connected with USB2.0 (high-speed).

Using the latest EAC (Exact Audio Copy) software we are able to detect important drive features, especially concerning Audio CD Ripping. The drive does seem to support C2 error info and doesn't Cache Audio which will result higher ripping speeds.

The drive does support C1/C2 and PIE/PIF error scanning with OptiDriveControl and other similar software.

We found around the web the product specifications, mostly for the inner drive (The TSSTcrop TS-L633C)