SEA TECH External USB Blu-Ray Writer

Highly recommended. Its works great on my mid 2012 MacBook Pro (i7 quad core running OS X 10.8). I plugged it in and it worked perfectly, no driver installs, and all my existing software saw the drive and worked with it as expected.Likes:Works right out of the box (no drivers needed)Very smallVery lightweightExcellent for laptop users who need to carry it with themNo power supply needed (nor is any supplied)USB 2.0 cable supplied (this is one of those special double headed cables, in case you have an older computer that can't sufficient power via one USB port, then yo would simply plug in the other tendril into another USB port, unlike other Blu-ray drives on the market, this second cable is long enough to reach all the way around to the other side of a laptop, for those that have one USB port on each side. On my MacBook Pro I have only used the one port, and have successfully burned dozens of perfectly functioning disks).Tough aluminum enclosure seems able to take a lot of use and remain perfectly serviceableAttractive (its a solid piece of aluminum with the center machined out, to house the drive) the drive has a black face and the rear panel is white plastic. (The drive is a conventional tray loaded design.)Reliable operation with intense daily use (I've used it heavily every day since I purchased it, in fact it works so well that I'm in the process of making backups of all my archived data and it works very well).Very reasonable price considering you get the drive which can read and write to Blu-ray, DVD and CD; a very nice, tough aluminum enclosure that is seamless and well built) and a USB 2 cableDislikesOnly one: Machined aluminum edges Edges feel almost sharp. They have never cut me but they don't have the finished feeling of the aluminum edges in my MacBook Pro, which has never felt sharp.Oddities-Almost all Blu-ray drives, this one included, will play back Blu-ray movies at a max speed of 2X (instead of the rated 6X). This is intentional (Panasonic says that its to keep the drive noise level down while watching movies. So keep that in mind to set your expectations appropriately. If you are working with data then you get the full 6X speed.-You need to get your own software to play back Blu-ray movies off a Blu-ray disk. This is true of all operating systems (there are a few expensive Windows machines with an added cost Blu-ray option that can play Blu-ray discs out of the box, but its not Windows doing it, they just install the extra, third-party software for you , and they charge you a fortune to do this, its much cheaper to get this drive and download free software yourself). This is a Sony licensing issue. Until recently you had to pay for aftermarket software to get Blu-ray movie playback, but that is no longer true, check here for detailed information (read the entire post before making up your mind).Notes:Although this page says that Apple does not support Blu-ray, that is completely misleading. No computer manufacturer supports Blu-ray, you always have to get your own Blu-ray player software to play Blu-ray (this includes Windows. Sometimes some machines are sold with a package that includes a Blu-ray play but if you check carefully you'll see that its been added on by someone, it was not created by the manufacturer. This is not a problem, I'm just clarifying a question that I have been asked many times since posting this initial review.Apple does support Blu-ray and you can prove it by simply plugging this drive into a Mac, insert a BD-R or BD-RW and you will be able to burn files to just like a DVD-R or DVD-RW. To watch a Blu-ray movie, someone has to pay Sony a significant licensing fee. So far no manufacturer, including Microsoft, has paid the fee so they cannot build in movie playback support for Blu-ray movie discs. After trying a few apps I finally settled on Mac Blu-ray player, its works well, offers beautiful picture quality and is updated often. Yes you have to pay for it, there is no such thing as free lunch. The free players have gone out of business or have stopped supporting Blu-ray playback. This includes VLC which does have Blu-ray playback support built in but does not have decryption keys so it cannot play back commercial Blu-ray movies because they have not payed the license fee. A few clever persons have figured out a way to get a set of keys into VLC and that did work for a few months but stopped being updated a few years ago so no movies produced in the past few years can work on VLC with with those keys.May Blu-ray player can play a lot of different video formats so I consider it a must have it you are serious about Blu-ray playback on a Mac. There are commercial programs available for Windows, with mixed results so you will have to carefully test the, out before plunking down any cash for them.Multi region support: Like most (actually all the ones hat I know of) current Blu-ray players, this one seems to be region locked. If you have discs that you want to play from different regions with different region codes (i.e. different countries) this unit, like most others will not work for you, and notice that there is no promise of multi region support listed in this products description. I aded this to my review because I received questions on this and people donut seem to understand that this is a legal issue, not a limitation of any specific hardware.If you need multi region support then I suggest that you search for that criteria and speak to the supplier to make sure that you will get what you want, that is not whats being offered here.I use this drive almost everyday to watch Blu-ray movies and burn Blu-ray data discs and still am enjoying the super reliable performance, rugged and portable construction and reasonable cost. I have recommended this unit to my family and friends.[...]