So far it works great. No problems... it's like a giant floppy or zip disk. I had a CD-RW but had problems with it... no problems thus far with the DVD-RAM. I bought a Toshiba 2002 unit. I DID have to buy special software to make it work though. So if you buy a bare drive... be prepared to dish out another $80 or so to get the software to let you use it.... or just buy a combo.