The eSAU 208 is a slim and compact external DVD writer, that is aimed mainly at those who have laptops that lack of a similar drive. Its small size and low weight help carrying it around without much effort, as it can fit in most of the laptop carrying bags that have a small amount of space free. Its USB-powered feature helps even more, as you don't need to be sitting near an AC plug in order to use it. Just plug it into the PC (two USB plugs - one for the data and one for the power) and you can staqrt using it immediately, with only a cost on your laptop's battery.

The reading aspect of the drive, to begin with, turned out to be pretty good, as it read every media that we inserted according to its specifications. As far as reading defected CD and DVD media, we can say that the drive handled them not as well as we would expect. Average performance with the defected CDs and read errors were produced on two of the ABEX defected DVD test discs.

Moving on to the drive's writing speed, the drive burned succesfully all MIDs according to its specifications. Only one of them wasn't readable by the drive, the CMC MAG. AE1. In addition, the drive seems to need some wotk when burning DVD-R/+R DL media. The burning quality tests that we performed generally reported good results.

All in all, the eSAU 208 is not the fastest writer around, but if you want something for your laptop, its pros overcome its slow reading and writing speeds. If this is what you are looking for, then this drive is more than recommended. It can be found online for about $70-$80. And if the black and white colors of the drive are not your favorite, the SAU108, which is also available in red colors, will soon be complemented with piano black (from February) and navy blue (from April).