There's nothing particularly exciting about the physical aspect of the drive. It's about the size of a burner and comparable in weight. The front is painted a nice black color (though not an annoying reflective vinyl-ish black, just "black") with the white DVD label we've all come to love. There's the standard headphone jack (useless), the volume control (useless), the play/fast forward button (useless), and eject button and a green LED. For some reason people like to have lots of buttons even if they never use them (and very few people will plug headphones into a DVD-ROM to listen to music using the analog codec).