OWC introduces first external Blu-ray drive with quad interface
OWC ANNOUNCES INDUSTRY'S FIRST BLU-RAY EXTERNAL DRIVES WITH "QUAD INTERFACE"
OWC Mercury Pro Features Quad Interface for FireWire800/400, USB 2.0, & eSATA – for Mac and PC 4X Speed Writes up to 50GB, Reads/Writes HD-DVD, DVD/DVD-R, CD-R/RW Discs
October 22, 2008 -- Woodstock, IL -- Other World Computing (OWC®) http://www.macsales.com, a leading Mac and PC technology company, announced today its new line of OWC Mercury Pro™ Blu-ray "Quad Interface" external drive solutions. The first Blu-ray external drives on the market offering a "Quad Interface" of FireWire 800, FireWire 400, USB 2.0, and eSATA, the OWC Mercury Pro drives feature 4X Blu-ray disc write speed for burning up to 1 gigabyte of data per minute; a data transfer rate up to 150MB per second; Plug and Play connection flexibility; and the convenience of compatibility with both Windows and Macintosh systems.
Burn up to 50GB per Blu-ray Disc and Read/Write to All Optical Media
Immediately available and priced starting at $499.99, the Mercury Pro Blu-ray external drive solutions are ideal for consumers with large amounts of High-Def or other video, photos, music, and data files that they want to archive or retrieve using optical media. 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 the well-known advantages of Blu-ray, such as high-capacity storage (burn up to 50GB per disc, enough space for a four hour High-Def movie); full high-quality HD Picture; and Surround Sound capabilities. 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.
Pricing for OWC Mercury Pro Blu-ray Write and Read external drive solutions:
* OWC Mercury Pro SW-5583: $499.99. Writes and reads Blu-ray, DVD, DVD-RAM, CD-R/RW discs. Includes all connection cables and two 25GB BD-R discs.
* OWC Mercury Pro SW-5583T: $579.99. Writes and reads Blu-ray, DVD, DVD-RAM, CD-R/RW discs. Includes all connection cables, starter media, and full retail version of Roxio Toast 9 Titanium (Mac OS X).
OWC Mercury Pro Blu-ray "Quad Interface" external drive solutions have 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.
For more information on the OWC Mercury Pro Blu-ray external drive solutions, visit:
http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/firewire/optical-drives/
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Multi-format-mayhem @ Oct 22nd 2008 1:22PM
"if only we could convince Steve that Blu-ray and Macs could indeed get along together, we'd really be satisfied."
Oh really?
Satsified with a price-tag of $500 - $580!?
Since when?
Satisfied with the price of Blu-ray blank media that makes something as relatively complex, elaborate and expensive to manufacture as a (far larger capacity) HDD competitive!?
Since when?
Come on, take the 'shiney new format goggles' off, stop being blinded by this shiney new nonsense and wake up to reality.
Blu-ray 'could' be a useful storage medium but right now they are just laughably over-pricing it.
Matt Kern @ Oct 22nd 2008 6:16PM
I kind of agree with you. But, I remember when I got my first DVD-R disc, and it was $9 for one. DVD's used to be pretty expensive, granted, not as expensive as Blu Ray media. (I was looking for printable BD-R's, and I about shat myself at the price [$12 to $20 per disc, with a minimum purchase of 25 discs]). Anyway, the way that DVD-R costs were brought down was by companies embracing it. To me, it seems that since Apple spent some money in the R&D of Blu Ray they would want to see their format do well, and embracing it would do that. Apple is confusing the shit out of me right now; seemingly beginning to abandon Firewire (their baby), and not embracing Blu Ray. To hear Apple say that the iTunes HD content is perfectly good is just nonsense. Upressed SD DVD's look better than that shit, and still have a higher data rate.
Apple, what gives?
Dave @ Oct 22nd 2008 2:15PM
Seems great drive to me :)
mcm @ Oct 23rd 2008 7:45AM
Interesting that it reads HD DVD but doesn't have an HD DVD logo on it. How many other blu-ray drives do that?
Also interesting is that this is a Panasonic drive. So Panny is making HD DVD dives now?
squiggleslash @ Oct 23rd 2008 11:25AM
Yeah, their press release is a tad confused. The page for the item is here:
http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Other%20World%20Computing/MRF8UE5583/
It only contains one reference to HD DVD, and it looks like that's an ambiguous cut and paste from somewhere. On the spec sheet itself, HD DVD is not mentioned.