FastMac's Trio of USB Blu-ray Drives - Something for Everyone

Big screen laptop owners will sure dig this high-def optical upgrade option from FastMac. The Mac peripheral specialist has unveiled a trio of Blu-ray slim optical drives that interface exclusively with USB 2.0. Oddly, none of the MacBooks can playback Blu-ray due to inherent limitation of Leopard & QuickTime. You can always dual boot back to Windows Vista and XP but you still need to shell out your own copy of PowerDVD to decrypt and watch the commercial Blu-ray movies.

There are 1 BD-ROM drive and 2 Blu-ray re-writers. The least expensive BD reader goes for $99.95, reads BD-ROM at 2x, and doubles a fairly capable DVD burner. The $299.95 model can burn any single- and double-layer BD at 1x, which is agonizingly slow at a rate of 90 minutes per 25GB disc. The highest end quadruples read/write speed to 4x for BD-R (25GB write-once) and 2x for rest of the BD disc types. For a USB 2.0-only Blu-ray drive, you probably won't see anything faster than 6x considering a 8x operation will require uninterrupted 36MB/s bandwidth, which at such speed very few USB hosts can manage without special driver.