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OWC Announces External, Quad Interface Blu-ray Drive

by , 1:50 PM EDT, October 22nd, 2008

Other World Computing (OWC) announced on Wednesday the industry's first quad interface external Blu-ray storage drive for Macs and PCs. The drive has FireWire 400 & 800, eSATA and USB 2 interfaces and has been tested with most Apple and Windows built-in DVD/CD tools.

The OWC Mercury Pro Blu-ray drive features 4X Blu-ray disc write speed for burning up to 1 gigabyte of data per minute, a data transfer rate up to 150 MB per second, plug and play connection flexibility and the convenience of compatibility with both Windows and Macintosh systems.


Mercury Pro Blu-ray "Quad Interface"

Mercury Pro Blu-ray drives read and/or write virtually all optical media, including Blu-ray, HD-DVD, DVD-RAM, and CD-R/RW. The drives provide high-capacity storage, up to 50 GB per disc. In addition, the new OWC Mercury Pro Blu-ray drives now have write performance twice as fast as previous Mercury Pro Blu-ray external drive models.

OWC Mercury Pro Blu-ray "Quad Interface" external drive has been fully tested for compatibility with most Apple and Windows built-in and third party DVD/CD tools and players, including Apple iTunes, Apple Disc Burner, Apple iDVD 5, Apple DVD Studio Pro, EMC Retrospect Express, NTI DragonBurn, Roxio Toast, Roxio Easy Media Creator, and Nero Burning.

Previously, external Blu-ray drives could only be authored with Roxio Toast under Mac OS X.

The OWC Mercury Pro model SW-5583 is immediately available and priced at US$499.99. The product includes all connection cables and two 25 GB BD-R discs. Also available is Model SW-5583T which includes a full retail copy of Roxio Toast 9 Titanium for Mac users and is priced at US$579.99

Note that this is storage drive only and cannot be used to play Blu-ray movies.

Observer Comments

Show: Subjects Only | Full Comments
Close Name:gopher Posts: 291 Joined: 28 Mar 2002
Subject: Expensive brick

Quote
Note that this is storage drive only and cannot be used to play Blu-ray movies.


That's sort of like selling a car without windshields to look out the window. How are you supposed to test your production, without some software to play it back? Oh now I have to buy another doohicky, attach it to my TV, and play it back. No wonder Blu-ray hasn't caught on. Pro artists using Macs are not going to buy something that costs more and does less.

Close Name:Intruder -   TMO Mac Specialist Posts: 3149 Joined: 07 Jul 2004
Subject:

All due to DRM.

Close Name:acdc1174 Posts: 723 Joined: 16 Apr 2004
Subject: Steve's bag of hurt.

This is why SJ referred to Bluray as a "bag of hurt". DRM- HDCP specifically. For all the people clamoring for Bluray support better be very careful what they wish for...they may just get it, and all the headaches it will entail.

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