Sony DDU220E, this drive was a best buy item recommended by PC World when the drive first debuted in the market a few years ago. It was a great deal when they first packaged it along with Hollywood Plus decoder card, especially since the CPUs back then were not so fast to run DVD movies at decent speed without some help from such a handy hardware. Well, enough for the history lesson and let me get into the juicy details about the actual drive.
As a DVD-ROM drive, x5 does well enough to playback most movies. I especially love the fact that this drive is just old enough to be a region code free drive (aka. RPC-1 drive) since I do love watching foreign films as well as American blockbusters. The American movie industry's been really cracking down on making sure that the region code gets implemented on DVD-ROM drives. The result is that all new DVD-ROM drives made since ca.2000 has been region-locked (aka. RPC-2 drive) and special firmware to unlock them has been removed from easily accessible websites. So DDU220E is one of the best drives lingering in the market with a great code-free solution.
Now, for those who do not need to worry about this issue, DDU220E is certainly not the fastest drive nor is it the quietest. As some others have pointed out, it is pretty noisy with some discs and that could get pretty annoying. The new drives (such as Pioneer DVD-116) are much faster (up to x16-DVD read and x40 some-CD read, as I write this) and quieter. And if you look on eBay, you can find these drives for less than $100 easily. So if you are in the market for a DVD-ROM drive for your machine, and not really interested in the region-free feature, I wouldn't recommend the Sony drive. Also, I've seen a few other people with DDU220E in my situation: the drive stopped working all together, for no apparent reason. If I were the only one with the problem, I would think it is just a bad luck, but since I've encountered a few others with the same problem, I am afraid to recommend the product to anyone as strongly. Only people that I would recommend this drive to would be the die-hard foreign film fans, the ones who are willing to take this small chance of drive failing on you for its archaic quality.
As far as installation & ease of use, it is only as hard as using a standard CD-ROM drive. If you can install a CD-ROM drive, you can install this with a breeze!

Recommended: No