MCE Technologies, LLC announced the immediate availability of its 6X Blu-ray recordable drive for PowerMac and Mac Pro on Monday. Unlike previous drives, it is natively recordable with Mac OS X 10.5.2 or later and can record data directly from the Finder with no additional software required.

The MCE 6X Blu-ray Recordable Drive is capable of recording to Blu-ray media at up to 6X, to DVD ± R media at up to 16X, to CD-R media at up to 40X, can read HD DVD-ROM media, and is LightScribe compatible.

"Professional Blu-ray movies, playable on set-top Blu-ray players and the Sony Playstation 3, can be created with the MCE 6X Blu-ray Recordable Drive using Adobe Premier Pro CS3is Encore program in conjunction with either Adobe Premier Pro CS3 or Appleis Final Cut Pro editing software and basic Blu-ray movies can be created using optional Roxio Toast 9 Titanium and Toast 9 HD/BD Plug-in," MCE said on Monday.

The drive comes with instructions and is user installable on Apple PowerMacs and Mac Pros. Software is also included that allows one of these Macs running Boot Camp to access the drive with Windows XP.

The MCE 6X Blu-ray Recordable Drive plus one free 25 GB Blu-ray disc is priced ay US$499. A bundle with Roxio Toast 9 and the HD/BD plug-in is priced at US$599.