The internal DVD reader and writer works out of the box for reading and writing both DVDs and CDs at acceptable speed.

The hardware seems to be a pretty much standard S-ATA DVD/R+W. If you have trouble writing DVDs or CDs, make sure that you are in the group "cdrom" and can actually access the device (/dev/sr0 most likely, and the soft links /dev/dvdrw and /dev/cdrom).