yes, and no. It's portable, which is great if you're on the go, but it does create some limitations, most notably that it only burns dvd's at 2x (burning 4.5 gigs of data will take about 30 minutes at this speed). Some people have told me that it's a little noisy, and can get rather hot (not unlike a laptop, i guess), but these were the only nitpicks. Nero works just fine with the drive using both CD-R and DVD-R formats.
It also is very flakey if you use USB 1.1 (which is the fault of USB, not the device). I would highly recommend using the firewire bus or USB 2.0 connection to burn. Also, be aware is requires an AC adapter - this isn't something you can use on an airplane. BECAUSE of that, I would simply go with a faster Pioneer burner
in a generic firewire/USB 2 enclosure. Yes, it's bulkier, but it's cheaper and faster.
anyway, hope that helps...