Hi,

Day before yesterday my NEC ND-5100A DVD+RW drive on Insp. 8600 gave up so Dell decided to give me a free replacement. Dell engineers showed up next morning with a SONY DW-D56A (PART NO. M7733 Description on box: ASSY,DVD+/-RW,8X,SONY,DMOD )next morning installed it, checked if everything was ok and left. Right after, I discovered for Dell forums, that the Sony drive was plagued with problems and was pretty ticked off about the Sony. About 4 hours later, I get another package by courier which also contained a new DVD drive.

Apparently, some logistics error caused 2 drives to be sent to me. I told the UPS guy that I'd already received a replacement in the morning and sent this one back with him. In the mean time I noticed that the second box had contained the following info: PART NO. M6791 PART DESCRIPTION: ASSY,DVD+/-RW,8X,IDE,DMOD,NFI. Nowhere on the box did it say NEC. I looked up Dell driver downloads page, and there were only 2 drives that were 8X DVD RW, SONY & NEC.

A couple of hours later, with my suspicions I rushed off the courier office and informed Dell that I'd be swapping the drives since I wasn't happy with the SONY.

Put second new drive in the laptop and VOILA !!! NEC ND-6500A, works like a charm.

Sorry for the elaborate description of events....But in short yea..., there is a Dell branded NEC ND-6500A for Inspiron 8600.

Peace !!!

Hi,

 

Great :) The 'normal' NEC ND-6650A doesn't fit :(

I guess because this is a slimline drive, and Dell uses 'modular drivebay' or so.

So I'll have to go looking for the Dell-branded NEC-drive, which shouldn't be to hard with your part number :)  (M6791)

Thanks :)

 

hmm, I am a little confused as to why that 6650 won't fit as it should have the same dimensions as the 6500.

Hi,

I've removed my DVD-drive from the Inspiron 8600 yesterday.

I've compared it against a NED ND-6650 (ordered one for another laptop), and there are 2 differences:

1) The connector to the mainboard on the Dell drive is about 1.5 to 2 times as large as on a normal Slimline-drive.

2) This connector is positioned more to the right of the drive, and with a normal slimline it's positioned more to the left of the drive.

see if what others have done in this thread helps.

http://www.cdrinfo.com/forum/tm.asp?m=114540&mpage=1&

I want to exchange my Samsung drive with an NEC ND6650 as well. I already have noticed that the connector on the back is on the other side and has different dimensions. To me it looks like that the original Samsung drive is inside some sort of adapter. I removed all screws but I still couldn't get it out. Has anyone managed to do this?

Vandroiy.