Okay for starters, given the price, if it lasts two years of normal use, it'll earn it's keep and then some. Secondly, I am seeing people complain about it not including the cables. Having been a system builder for the better part of two decades because I'm in the process of transitioning into a dinosaur, this is unfortunately very common. The reality is you can buy a three pack of SATA 3.0 (6 Gbps) cables for less than ten bucks. In the world of marketing, given the current price of this drive, each additional dollar represents a five percent increase in price. They do this math on pretty much every thing tech related these days. In truth, you wouldn't want the included cables anyway, as to this day whenever SATA cables are included, they're so substandard they can literally cause your system to hang while accessing a drive. You're better off. I have included a screen shot of VSO Inspector listing all of the features and standards supported, as well as firmware version info. One thing to note, Asus does not have a newer firmware available. In fact the one on their site is 1.0 versus the 1.11 on these drives. Do not download that firmware, it is essentially a downgrade, which is bad. There is literally only one CD or DVD format that is wholly unsupported on this drive: DVD-RAM. While this won't matter to you, I'm a bizarre media aficionado. I have HD-DVD RW and HD-DVD R discs, working 5,25" floppy drives, and if I could, I'd own a working Laserdisc burner. I'm a weirdo. I do actually have DVD-RAM discs with valuable data on them, and this is sort of a bummer, but expected, as DVD-RAM even when it was in play as a standard was still rare for the most part. Healthcare used it a bit, and the very first DVR boxes did too. I could ramble about how Magneto-Optical drives were sort of DVD-RAM drives as well, but that's another day. You may have noticed they mentioned this drive also supports a secure erase functionality. You should pay attention to this, as it works even if files on an old CD-R or DVD-R are unreadable. It does not just work on rewriteable, it works on single write media (see attached pics). The data erasure functionality is a little unsteady, but it works using ImgBurn freeware if you select the "SmartErase" option and run the "full" erase. It's under the "Tools" menu. Takes about 15 minutes a disc in my experience. After it finishes, the same disc will report as "Incompatible Medium Installed" which means at the very least the media identifier and table of contents have gone bye bye. Hopefully the data track(s) are gone too? No real way to know, unfortunately. If you're paranoid when it comes to data and disposal, this erase functionality is great. One more layer of security in a world it pays to be excessively cautious in. I wouldn't say you can rely on it, but it works. I'd still shred or destroy the media as you see fit as well. I know DVD recording is becoming a relic, and while I could actually get mad I spent ten times as much fifteen years ago on what was basically the same drive, I'm actually glad we've progressed as much as we have. My one and only real ding against this drive: the tray does not lend well to vertical loading. Be sure to pay attention if you're installing this on an old slim formfactor or Dell Optiplex "DT" formfactor computer. There's not enough of a lip to stop the disc from tipping a few degrees and getting jammed. You've been warned. My DVD+R and DVD-R burns are 3 for 3, no failures thus far. Burned at 8x and 16x, seem solid.