Quad-Interface Blu-Ray Burner at 12x Appears

News
By Kevin Parrish
published

This external Blu-ray burner offers four ways to connect to a PC or Mac.

Looking for an external (or internal) drive to store all those "special files" on disk? Look no further than OWC's Mercury Pro 12x Blu-ray burner, using a Pioneer BDR-205 and costing a whopping $349.99 USD. This Blu-ray drive supports burning up to 50 GB of data or high-definition video on BD-R dual-layer media at 12x speed; the drive burns at 2x when using BD-RE. Or, if you prefer sticking to the old-school DVDs, consumers can cram 8.5 GB on a dual-layer disk at 16x; CD-R media burns at 40x.

But what makes this device really cool is its quad interface, offering four ways for consumers to connect the burner to a Mac or PC. Offering pure Plug & Play support, the Mercury Pro provides FireWire 800 (two ports), FireWire 400 (one port), USB 2.0 (one port), and eSATA (one port). The drive also includes cables for each connection.

For $449.99 USB, OWC is also offering this bundle, throwing in Roxio's Toast 10 Titanium Pro but it's only compatible with Macintosh hardware, requiring Mac OS X v10.5.x. Of course, Windows users have a plethora of more advaned burning utilities.

Kevin Parrish
34 Comments Comment from the forums
  • ominous prime
    Neat product, but I don't think it justifies the 350$ price tag. I could build another computer for that much.
    Reply
  • darkknight22
    A step in the right direction, but the media def has not caught up in price to justify it now.

    Even those professionals that could make use out of something like this probably have something equivalent or better at a commercial grade level.
    Reply
  • ant1-b0dy
    I don't see this going far. I see sites like Hulu seeing double or even triple the users in the next year or so due to the increasing popularity of Netbooks - of which do not have a CD/DVD drive, With Windows 7's simplified and improved file-sharing system; it is now easy for anyone with a Netbook to watch a movie that is in the DVD/Blu-Ray drive of another computer.
    Reply
  • animal_chin
    Omg you spelled advanced wrong! Fix it before all the haters complain how Tom's is going downhill.
    Reply
  • chinesemafia69
    $449.99 USB?
    isn't it USD??
    Reply
  • El_Capitan
    12x Blu Ray speeds on 4x Blu Ray disc speeds = 4x speed... well worth the $450 price tag.
    Reply
  • ptroen
    Honestly unless I'm buring 100 different blue rays a week this purchase makes absolutly no sense. dvd burners are so cheap now why would you spend like 10x the amount? 1 TB of storage also goes for like less $100. And actually if you have like $300 you probably get like what? 6-10 TB or 200 blue ray disks. And if you need the backup blue ray discs which are mainly movies won't you just go buy the lost copy again?
    Reply
  • nice mac compatible... if only it was firewire :(
    Reply
  • Wait it is firewire... 400 and 800.. nice!
    Reply
  • cybrcatter
    chinesemafia69$449.99 USB?isn't it USD??
    hehe, classic Kevin
    Reply