External Write Blocker that works with an External Optical Drive?

Question

I need an external write blocker that works with an external optical drive (CD / DVD drive).

We bought a Tableau T8U but it doesn't recognise the optical drive. Tableau tell me they have nothing that will work.

It needs to be external as it gets attached to more than one PC (quarantine and then network).

Any suggestions please.

Answer 1

The optical media workflows I've come across do not use a write blocker as writing (burning) to optical media is much more difficult to do incidentally than with magnetic or mass storage media. If you absolutely require write blocking for optical media, NYU appear to use write blocked drives according to https://archive.nyu.edu/bitstream/2451/43877/2/Schweikert_OpticalMediaPreservationNYU_2018.pdf. You can also disable disc burining in the Windows registry https://www.technipages.com/enable-disable-cd-burning-windows

Comments

Another possibility could be to use a drive that can only read. I'm not sure if 48x read-only CD drives are available, but it's been useful for other formats like DVD-RAM