Blu-Ray External Drive and Disc for MAC

[maccebu]

I am new to Blu-ray. Any recommendation for mac environment? My boss wants it and will be mainly used for archiving old projects and store it offsite.

[fangpyre]

There are a few options. Consider the Lacie.

[Magnus]

I reviewed an LG one last year that worked well.

[maccebu]

@Fang
Thanks for the suggestion. I am still looking on google some review on Lacie if it is worth it to buy

@Magnus
Kindly please post the link here so I can read that review. I need to know if its good or not

Correct me if I am wrong there are 25GB, 50GB and 100GB external Blu-Ray drives right?

should I go with the 100 GB or stick with 50GB as the 100GB are kinda new. Moreover I am going to use toast titanium and or finder burner when writing. Will these apps be fine for the BLu-Ray? I know toast supports blu-ray but not sure with the finder..

[fangpyre]

Recordable is only 25GB per side and layer.
There are 2 layer discs that can take upto 50GB, but that takes a more expensive drive.

I haven't seen a dual-side disk, but that would be how they reach 100GB, but its essentially the same as 2 dual-layer disks.

Blu-ray Disc recordable - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[Magnus]

@Magnus
Kindly please post the link here so I can read that review. I need to know if its good or not

I seem to remember it was in The National but they don't put the articles online. Here's the text for it:

In the big HD format wars Blu-ray won but even that achievement doesn't seem to have resulted in the penetration in the consumer market that many would have predicted. LG’s dual-format BE06 drive is a good choice for you if you have both HD-DVD and Blu-ray discs but don't expect it to be fast or portable. It will read both formats as well as write Blue-ray discs at a not too shabby maximum 6x speed. In addition it reads and writes pretty much any other format for CDs and DVDs that you can imagine. The drive reminds me of my very first CD-ROM drive from some 20 years ago. It's a big piece of kit that requires you to plug in a power adapter. I guess it cannot get enough power from the one USB connection but it would be nice if LG made this drive truly portable and powering through USB would be a requirement for that. So portability is not the BE06's strong suite. But even though it's large it looks pretty good. LG seems to have gone for a sort of first-generation iMac look with shiny white plastic. LG bundles the common CyberLink Suite for Windows with the BE06, which will take care of all of your software needs when it comes to burning and reading discs. At first when I popped in a Top Gun Blu-ray movie disc- don't judge me too harshly for the choice of movie- the software said it couldn't play the movie. After a software update it played the movie just fine. Then it was an easy task to burn a data disc too. A folder with about 21GB of files inside it took just about 50 minutes for my test computer to write to a 2x BD-RE disc. This would of course work as a good way of handling your backups because it handles so much more data than a DVD but be prepared to pay quite a bit for the media. Looking around Dubai for writable Blu-ray discs I finally found a few at a major electronics store for AED89 per disc. It should be mentioned that if you're a Mac user there is only one reason for you to consider this drive as there is no way of playing back Blu-ray movies in Mac OS X. But with Roxio's Toast 10 (Roxio - Toast 10 Titanium Family) you can burn Blu-ray data discs so you can use it for backup. It would have been nice if LG to bundled that as well so Mac users could use the drive for Blue-ray burning right out of the box. To summarize, LG's BE06 is an expensive, external dual format drive that can write Blu-ray and almost any other format. It's really a drive that few consumers will be interested in but for some it might just be the perfect solution for their movie playing or backup needs.

[maccebu]

Just to update this thread.

We ended up buying from OWC their 5.25" Blu-Ray PIONEER Quad-Interface external drive which can write in a single layer (25GB) Blu-Ray disc of up to a speed of 12X and can write in a dual layer (50GB) disc of up to a speed of 2x cost like around USD 400. You can connect the external Blu-Ray drive to different interfaces such as USB2, FW400, FW800 and eSata.

It works on Apple's Finder burner. However its kinda tricky as you need to create a burn folder first, drag the files you want on that burn folder, then burn.

Funny as I am most comfortable with inserting the disc first, dragging the files to the empty disk, then burn and if you go this way it always pops up an error on the finder saying the disc you inserted does not have enough space in which I knew that I inserted a Blu-Ray disc.

We have also tried Roxio Toast 10 and burning 25GB of data is as easy as drag and drop. The Blu-Ray disc can hold upto 23.5 GB to be exact and not 25GB.

It took 40 - 50 mins to burn a 23GB of files with Toast 10 and Apple Finder burner.

The Blu-Ray drive can burned as well different media's. The ones we've tried is CD and DVD DL (8GB) and its super fast wether using Toast or Apple's Finder burner.