Other World Computing (OWC) announced on Wednesday the industryis 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.