Almost all of the cables included with drives we tested had USB Type-A connectors on the computer’s end, but the inclusion of a USB-C cable or a USB-A–to–C adapter in the box is a nice bonus. On the drive’s end, we prefer the still-common Micro-USB port, though the larger Mini-USB is fine too (optical drives with USB-C ports are rare to nonexistent).
But if you’re burning or ripping discs, the rate at which a drive can move data from your computer’s hard drive to the disc or vice versa becomes more important. We didn’t require Blu-ray drives to support reading and writing to Ultra HD (or UHD, or 4K) Blu-ray discs, but we considered it a nice bonus if you didn’t have to pay much more for that feature.
