LG Ultra Slim Portable WP50NB40 Blu-ray Writer

Recently my external SSD failed and I feared that all of my data was lost. A high-end company reported that the drive was too corrupted for any salvage.

Thankfully I had an older My Book HDD and a handful of flash drives. ALL of that material was saved! What a gut-wrenching trauma that was, though. NEVER AGAIN.

This is the drive to burn 100gb BDXL Blu-Ray M-Discs. I bought the same exact LG model as it had BDXL in the title and specs, but the “100gb” is the key. Look for “100gb” support with any burner you look at.

I have burned four 100gb discs – a little under 88gb each. All are readable – their files can be copied and work fine. The videos play as they should.

Note that with the 100gb M-Discs, the actual loading capacity is around 92gb. This is a usual thing with all recordable discs as they require space for their system files.

M-Discs burn differently, not using organic dyes as with traditional DVD/CD types. They are approved for Archival storage.

Note that I have commented little on the actual drive. This is because it plugged and played perfectly with my Windows 11 desktop PC. I did not use the included burning software as it is confusing and irritating. I opened the My PC icon and dragged/dropped the files to this drive. Doing a lot of gigs takes some time but my data is now safer in one more way.

Final note: You MUST have a Blu-Ray drive to read Blu-Ray M-Discs. THIS drive reads them perfectly, yet the standard drive on my PC here and at work do not. The disc does not even appear once loaded. You may want to confirm that the 100gb discs will play on Blu-ray drives in-general. They may not as these discs are triple-layer. I am only now checking on this.

Back. Up. Your. Data!

This drive has been working great for me. It’s plug-and-play with no driver installation needed on macOS and Linux (and I presume Windows, but haven’t used with it).

It’s small and lightweight enough to be a great portable drive if you want to carry one in your laptop bag.

But that size and lack of weight has its downsides. The tray doesn’t pop out all the way on its own, akin to built-in CD/DVD drives in laptops back when they actually still had those, so you have to pull it out the remainder of the way to insert or remove a disc. Then when pushing it back in, it’s not heavy enough to hold itself in place, so you need to hold it down while pushing the tray in. The tray is flimsy-feeling, also similar to built-in drives in laptops back in the day.

I don’t swap discs frequently enough to care, but if I heavily used the drive, I would get a full-size 5.25″ drive (akin to those found in desktop PCs) in an external chassis instead of this one, since it’s sitting on my desk and not mobile. Those have much sturdier trays, they fully eject and retract on their own, and you don’t feel like you have to be careful to not break it.

It’s definitely a good portable drive. But if you’re not actually going to take it anywhere, you’d be better served by a sturdier full-size drive in my opinion.

I bought this to burn master DVDs and Blu-Ray BD-Rs for video production. I use Windows 10 and DVD Architect. Plugged it in and was Immediately recognized by Win10. This replaces an LG internal BD writer that was about 10 years old. I don’t care if the unit can play the disks, I only need it to burn them. Not sure if it is MAC compatible but will update once I find out. I’m a wedding and event videographer. The drive will get a lot of usage. I’m only expecting to get 2 or 3 years out of it. I think when they rate the unit to only be compatible with Win8, they are referring to the free software not the compatibility of the hardware. Mine works great with Win 10. The LG website does not rate this to be Win10 compatible.

It does what i wanted it to. It burns discs it hasn’t made a frisbie yet lol

This drive worked great for around 10 months. It quit working around the first of August. I purchased this on Amazon October 12, 2019. I only used this off and on during that time. I have another drive which is still working that I purchased around 3 or 4 years but it’s a different brand. I finally got time to test this more thoroughly tonight. I tried this on my Macintosh and also a desktop PC and it just makes funny noises. The Mac no longer recognizes it and the PC sees the drive but it thinks there is no disc inserted. I would not recommend this drive unless you only expect your electronics to last 10 months.

I bought this burner in order to backup my data on M-Disc and it was a flawless experience.
I successfully finalized the recording of 5 VERBATIM M-Disc BDXL 100GB using ImgBurn v2.5.8.0 on Windows 11 and this Blu-ray Burner. Each disc underwent and passed a verification process.

I opted for UDF version 2.60 for the file system to enhance long-term readability and kept all other settings at their default values. The writing speed for each disc was automatically defined by ImgBurn, yielding the following results:

Disk 1: Achieved an average write speed of 13,381 KiB/s (3.0x) with a peak at 17,878 KiB/s (4.1x)
Disk 2: Achieved an average write speed of 13,744 KiB/s (3.1x) with a peak at 17,871 KiB/s (4.1x)
Disk 3: Achieved an average write speed of 14,418 KiB/s (3.3x) with a peak at 17,870 KiB/s (4.1x)
Disk 4: Achieved an average write speed of 15,229 KiB/s (3.5x) with a peak at 17,879 KiB/s (4.1x)
Disk 5: Achieved an average write speed of 15,227 KiB/s (3.5x) with a peak at 17,875 KiB/s (4.1x)