Nowadays, most people prefer laptops to write or to stream music, movies, etc. online rather than getting their hands on the latest CDs in the market. Moreover, removing the optical module from a device also makes your data relatively more secure in case of theft. This resulted in the creation of external DVD units for laptops.Even though laptops with CD/ DVD drives are passé, there are people, like offline gamers, who are aching to try out their favorite game CDs. Thus, we have compiled the top 9 laptops with a CD/ DVD drive that you can get your hands on in 2020!
Top 9 Laptops with CD/DVD Drive — At a Glance
Best Overall Laptop with CD/DVD Drive – Dell Inspiron 3000
In an age when laptops are getting smaller and thinner, an optical module adds unwanted weight to the device. People have shifted to online sources for listening to music, watching movies, downloading the latest software, etc. This makes an inbuilt optical component all the more unnecessary. Affordable USB hard drives and online backup/ storage services are more convenient for storing and sharing media files, so you don’t need to stock up on blank CDs. A product with a CD module can be a necessity if you are into PC gaming. Especially if tangled cables are your pet peeve, an internal optical module is your best bet. The majority of laptops with a CD/ DVD chunk do not provide the best computing experience. Thus, external optical drives are recommended.
The Dell Inspiron 3000 looks simplistic but offers more for its price. We are not joking, don’t fall for its simplistic plastic body. It packs a punch under the plastic chassis, and it is quite large, better for content consumption and some light gaming. After all addition of the CD/DVD drive makes it viable for business and everyday use. Thanks to the hardware configuration and this laptop’s pricing, it is the overall best laptop with CD/DVD drive on our list. No kidding, this laptop does pack a lot of punch with its Core i3 – 1005G1 processor. It is the latest entry-level CPU with quite a lot of horsepower. The Dual-core processor might look weak but can efficiently run photoshop and light gaming when paired with the 8GB RAM. It already looks excellent, but the 256 PCIe SSD and 1 TB storage combo make it more compelling. A faster memory paired with a large data storage pool speaks more convenience for its price. The 17inch FHD display is the one to fall in love with. It might not be great at color reproduction, but it does have tons of viewing angles. Plus, it is suitable for checking out YouTube and Netflix. The keyboard has a shorter travel distance with tactile feedback. The 42 WHr battery will last through 6 hours under light usage. Great for people who travel a lot and for students who are away for most of the day.
Best Business Laptop with DVD Drive- Dell Vostro 3000
The Dell Vostro 3000 doesn’t break your bank and is our best Budget laptop with CD/DVD drive. The laptop fits right in the budget with its specifications. The addition of the CD/DVD drive helps a lot when using an optical disk. The Drive is readable/writeable, adding more usability.The Core i3 – 10110U is the best processor for the price and is back up with 8GB of RAM. The 2 cores and 4 threads are enough for basic tasks and some are slight in photoshop. The 256GB PCIe is faster storage, but the downfall is that it might not be enough. Other than that, there might not be a problem in the long run. There is a 1 TB option with similar pricing, but the system is upgradable. The 1080p display is stunning in the 15.6-inch form factor and is backed up with Intel’s UHD graphics. The keyboard is excellent with the low key travel and comfortable for longer typing sessions. Plus, you won’t be staying next to the power outlet thanks to its 42 WHr battery. You are getting a lot in terms of specification and powerhouse on this laptop.
Best Touchscreen with Numpad Laptop – Lenovo Ideapad 330
This comes to us as a shocker as well. The Lenovo Ideapad 330 is the best touchscreen laptop with CD/DVD drive in it. Not only is the specification excellent, but it also has to be one of the best laptops in our selection. The CD drive comes in handy in this convertible and offers tons of viewing display angles to watch movies or series. After all, it is a convertible, but it is lined up with quite the eccentric performance components. The Core i5 – 8250U is an excellent exception for the convertible backed up with 8GB of system memory. The Quad-core is robust, able to handle light to heavy tasks like photoshop and light video editing. Plus, the 1 TB HDD storage will be enough to store all your important data and photos. What can we say? We were stoked to see this performance at this price point. Not to forget the gorgeous 720p touchscreen display. It has fantastic color reproduction and better viewing angles. It looks more like a media consumption device with a powerful CPU in it. The keyboard might not be the best part, after all, with its hard but tactile keys. It is suitable for burst typing but might cause fatigue in the finger after a long typing session. If the battery life and the Bluetooth devices were up to date, it would have been the top pick. The 30Whr battery is terrible, lasting only 2 hours. The Bluetooth 4.1 connection has a lot of latency and might not be compatible with Bluetooth 5.0 devices.
Best HP Laptop with CD/DVD Drive – HP 2019 15.6-inch
The HP 2019 laptop is the cheapest laptop with CD/DVD drive. If you are looking to buy a laptop to preview your older optical disk, we present you with the HP 2019. It is not technically advanced like the other options but still good enough. Think of it as a home entertainment device. Hook it up to a TV or monitor, slide a disk of choice and watch older videos or movies. Plus, it does support apps like Netflix, etc., excellent to stream videos.The AMD A6 processor in the laptop is not exactly robust. It is the oldest CPU in our list but does hold against the test of time. Surfing through the internet is no problem for this device and can handle some spreadsheet work thrown at it. It might not be suitable for gaming, but the 8GB system memory does help open tons of tabs in Google Chrome. The 1TB internal storage is large enough and works as a backup drive to store your photos and personal videos. The 15 inch HD screen is not good for the price. There are laptops with better displays under this price, but most don’t have a CD/Drive. The viewing is excellent, but the color doesn’t have contrast and loses sharpness. The 40 Whr battery is efficient lasting 4 hours in everyday use. All in all, this might be the cheapest option for an entertainment device. Plus, you can always hook it up to a TV to stream content from a disk. Plus, it can do more than what your regular CD/DVD can do.
Laptop for Gaming with CD/DVD Drive – Asus FX73VE-WH71
OK, this section was tough to find. But we wouldn’t want to disappoint gamers out there who need a CD/DVD drive. It has decent specs for a gaming laptop with a CD/DVD drive. It is hard to find a decent specced laptop nowadays as each manufacturer doesn’t include a CD drive in a gaming laptop. Most people prefer to download their game library as it is viable. Games now reach 100GB of space, which might not fit the older and smaller optical disks well. The Core i7 – 7700HQ is a no brainer deal as for its price. But the prices have gone down a bit and vary according to the vendor. The Core i7 holds great on the latest game titles and backward compatible with older games. The 8GB system memory is enough for older titles but might suggest an upgrade to 16GB RAM. The GTX 1050 Ti provides perfect frames in the latest titles when played in 1080p medium settings. The addition of a 1 TB HDD is tremendous, but the SSD would be much better. The best part of the device is the 17-inch FHD screen. The larger FHD screen is excellent for gaming and color accurate work. It has vivid colors and great viewing angles. The keyboard has smaller key travel, and the backlight on the keyboard offers convenience in dimly lit rooms. The most impressive section is its battery life. Even though it is a gaming laptop, it lasts up to 4 hours in light tasks, viable for a college student and people who love to travel. An exceptionally efficient battery compared to its robust hardware.
Affordable laptop with Optical Drive- Lenovo ThinkPad E570
A business laptop should be portable and secure all in one. The Lenovo ThinkPad E570 makes itself an excellent business laptop with a CD/Drive. Whether you store your official data backed up in an optical disk or need a secure way to login to your device. Lenovo Thinkpad E570 is the best in the market in addition to its CD/Drive.The Core i5 – 7200U is a decent CPU for the system. It is powerful enough for doing daily office tasks. The 8GB System memory on the laptop helps open large spreadsheet files and open 7 – 8 Chrome tabs while simultaneously working in the background. The 256GB SSD isn’t large storage, but the high-speed SSD is excellent for loading and storing files. Plus, it doesn’t succumb to fall damage. The best part has to be its fingerprint sensor. Yes, protect your files from physical threats and add biometric protection. The 15 inch HD display is not great for video consumption, but Lenovo adds tons of ports to the laptop. The addition of the older and newer video ports allows presenting from the laptop way easier. The 7 hours of battery life is excellent when you travel. The keyboard on the device is OK with low key travel but no tactile feedback. The battery life is remarkable, almost standing up to the high-end ultrabook. The Lenovo ThinkPad E570 is a combo package for business power users. Versatility, power, security, and long-lasting battery, a great deal for a business device.
Premium Laptop with CD/DVD Drive – HP Envy 17t
The HP Envy 17t is a premium device with its stunning disk and support for CD/DVD Drive. Yes, even though it is an expensive device, it features a CD/DVD drive for versatility. Whether you watch movies on disk or online, it got you covered. Plus, it looks relatively better than all of the laptops listed above, but it is expensive.The Core i7 – 10510U does most of the heavy lifting for the laptop. Pairing the Core i7 with MX 250 GPU improves the graphical performance and allows for light to medium gaming sessions. MX 250 is an excellent option for light gaming users alike. The 256 PCIe SSD is more than enough thanks to its faster speed and reliability. The 1 TB HDD additional storage space is excellent and will last you tons of years to come. The 16 GB system memory for the Core i7 is enough and will be perfect and will work for four years. Nowadays, the application is not as tasking, so 16 GB will last you a long while. The FHD display on the HP Envy is gorgeous with vivid color reproduction and greater viewing angles. The additional touch capability of the device enhances the usability option. The keyboard is tactile and more comfortable to type. The fingerprint sensor on the device adds more security to this jam-packed device. The power users will be quite happy with its 52WHr battery lasting over 6 hours in light use. Using the Intel HD graphics instead of MX250 will increase the battery’s longevity, adding almost 2 hours, totaling 8 hours. All in all, this is a premium ultrabook device with a generous addition of hardware.
Ultimate Business Laptop – DELL Inspiron 15.6” HD
The DELL Inspiron 15.6” HD Business is best for office work and school work with its flexible performance and long battery life. The comfy soft-touch deck ensures comfort during long hours of productivity. However, the screen and sound quality are not the best in the lot.
Best Budget Gaming Laptop – MSI G Series GP60 Leopard-010
The powerful MSI G Series GP60 Leopard-010 is the best budget gaming laptop that can be used vigorously without freezing. Vivid display, great sound quality, and a comfy keyboard add on to making this an efficient mid-range product. Plus, the beefy processor can handle engineering software like Fluent, Aspen, etc. as well.The MSI G Series GP60 Leopard-010 will let you play games, work, watch movies, etc without selling a kidney in the black market! However, we do recommend getting some extra accessories like cooling pads and a detachable mouse for a better computing experience. Moreover, the HDD prevents the product from performing in its full potential, so upgrading to an SSD will be a smart move.
Buyer’s Guide
CPU
The CPU is the sole part meant to be focused on before buying a laptop. It dictates how well your device performs. The market is full of laptop offerings from Intel to AMD processors. But there are tons of things to contemplate before choosing a CPU.It is portable and doesn’t require external power. The below-mentioned laptop only reads normal CD and DVD optical disk. We suggest getting a separate Blu-ray disc player for the Blu-Ray disc format. The Blu-Ray disc uses different compression and data writing method which eventually won’t work with normal CD/DVD drives.CPU cores: The amount of cores will levy your user experience here. More the core, the more the performance. The better the CPU you can handle tons of multiple background tasks and open tons of applications. The CPU levy some resources when burning into the disk.Clock Speed: Clock speed is the rate at which the CPU completes 1 instruction per cycle. The clock speed is measured in GHz. The bigger the clock speed, the faster the CPU finishes the instruction per cycle.Intel has the upper hand in the laptop market with their CPUs. The market is filled with Intel laptops with scarce options from the AMD side. There are not many AMD laptops as manufacturers don’t fully don’t agree with AMD’s mobile processor. All the processors from the respected company have 2 versions: Performance and Low powered versions. The processors listed in the article are low powered processors.
GPU
The GPU is the graphics processing unit in the device. It is the essential part of the device after the CPU. The GPU accelerates the graphical power of the laptop enabling it to render great detailed animations in game or rendering work in applications like AutoCAD or Maya 3D.The Intel option is great for outputting general videos. But if you want to fully utilize the 4K or 8K TV then you might need an upgrade to 1050 Ti or higher. The Intel UHD graphics card inside the CPU is enough to project to a 4K display or higher. If you intend to game on this particular device we suggest getting a laptop with a dedicated GPU in it. Like our gaming laptop and premium laptop both utilize Nvidia’s dedicated GPU. But it sure does draw a lot of power from the battery.
Memory
Memory is another integral part of the system. RAM comes in different size UDIMM, SODIMM, DIMM modules. The laptop utilizes the SODIMM module which is small making them compact and densely packed with RAM chips. RAM also has a different generation of development. Each generation is denoted by DDR (Double Data Rate). Till date there are only 4 generations for RAM memory, DDR4 being the latest.In 2020, 8GB memory is the baseline for all laptops. Games are basically resource-heavy and chug your memory for better performance. 8GB is an okay option, but we suggest the 16GB or even higher for gaming. If you even buy an 8GB version one, you can still upgrade the RAM, making it a viable choice to pick.
Storage
Storage is a crucial part of any system. The technology has gone from spinning hard disks to solid-state drives. In 2020, all of the laptop ships with Solid State drives. Solid-state drives use NAND flash technology to store data allowing for faster read and write speed. SSD has been developing, each generation increasing the read and write speed. As the SSDs developed, their size has also decreased from 2.5 inch SSD to M.2 8820 form factor. The speed of the SSD has evolved from SATA III (600MB/s) to NVMe (2000MB/s).Hard drives are older but still reliable. The magnetic disc inside the hard drives saves data. The data is stored and read using the read/write head inside the harddrive. Since the hard drive utilizes mechanical components, there is a high chance to have physical damage. The hard drive has a read and write speed denoted by their RPM. Faster the RPM better the read and write speed. The market is filled with 5400RPM, 7200RPM, and 10000RPM. The 7200RPM and 10000RPM are the best hard drives.Comparing the hard drive with the SSD, the SSD is far superior and has faster read and write speed. The hard drives are not as fast as SSD but are way cheaper. SSD is expensive but because of its small compact and usage of non-mechanical components makes it more reliable. The SATA III SSD is faster than your average HDD, costing slightly higher. The NVMe SSD is way expensive but way reliable and faster than SATA III SSD.So these were our picks for the best laptop CD/DVD Drive. Think we missed any other laptop or appreciated our work. Write a comment down below and get updates on newer laptops or deals through our website.
Can you still buy laptops with a CD drive?
Yes. Even though most companies have stopped manufacturing laptops with CD drives, older models are still available.
Are CDs obsolete?
It is uncertain, but there is a possibility of CDs becoming obsolete in the coming years. Even today, you won’t see many people owning music CDs or movie DVDs. However, as trends come and go, ten years down the line, CDs may become specialty items like vinyl records!
Why do laptops not have CD drives anymore?
Since newer laptops are getting smaller and thinner, CD drives only add on unnecessary weight. Moreover, most of our multimedia and storage needs are taken care of online, so CDs are not used anymore. Thus, manufactures are doing away with optical drives.
Does Dell make a laptop with a CD drive?
Yes. The Dell Inspiron 15.6-inch and the Dell Inspiron 15 3000 are some of the best laptops with a CD drives.
Do you need a CD drive anymore?
Essentially, you don’t. However, if you happen to have a collection of old CDs/ DVDs and wish to check them out occasionally, an external portable optical unit is the way to go.
Conclusion
Although one does not practically require a product with an inbuilt optical module, the market does have a handful of options to choose from. Whether you need an inexpensive option or a high-end 4K device— our list contains a varied range of laptops considering everyone’s needs.Let us know in the COMMENT BOX whether you prefer to get a laptop with a CD drive or just invest in the latest model and buy a USB drive separately.
