ASUS Powerful Blu-ray Drive with 16x Writing Speed and USB 3.0 for Both Mac/PC Optical Drive BW-16D1X-U

Absolutely adore this drive, except for one or two caveats, front door is a little noisy tap on it goes away other than that perfect reads everything super fast and using it to archive movies works wonderfully, it's expensive but well worth it

Used this drive to archive about 10 hours of family home movies (approximately 25.5GB) onto Blu-ray discs for Christmas gifts. The device performed exactly as needed with no issues. Setup was straightforward on Windows - I don't recall needing to download any special software to get it working.The build quality seems solid, and the drive operated quietly without any heating problems during the lengthy burn process. While I can't speak to specific write speeds, the burning process took around 4 hours for my large video project, which seemed reasonable.Any error messages or compatibility issues I encountered were related to my video editing software, not the drive itself. For my needs - creating a permanent archive of precious family memories - this drive did its job perfectly.Note that I only used it with Windows and USB 3.0, so I can't speak to Mac compatibility or USB 2.0 performance. But for anyone looking to archive large amounts of data or video onto Blu-ray, this drive delivers.

A few things you should know: the power button is on the rear and that is annoying. This uses an AC adapter it is not USB powered. The eject button is not well designed but it does work, you have to hit it just right. The blue light on the front is very bright and large. It is the fastest optical drive I have ever used it initializes the disk quickly and the seek time is the fastest I have ever seen. That being said if you need a great optical drive this fits the bill however it could definitely use improved ergonomics, and the giant blue light on the front should be replaced with a small LED.

I was a little nervous after some of the reviews talking about the button on front and the switch in back. I dont get it, the switch on the back is easy to push on and off and the button on the front works just fine as well. Via Itunes I tested this against an LG BP50NB40 slim. I ripped a rather Large Norah Jones CD (forgot which one it was). The LG took 3 minutes 19 secs. The Asus took 2 minutes 7 seconds. The extra speed is making the cd ripping process much less painful. Could see the extra speed show up when ripping a dvd via MakeMKV as well. I also like that that opening it is electronic. After the CD finishes in Itunes, I just click the eject icon with my mouse, pop in a new CD and hit the front button on the Asus and off it goes. Super happy with the purchase. On a side note, and I will need to see if there is a way around it. I planned on using one with MakeMKV (since you can select which blu ray device to use) to rip my movies for plex, and then at the same time use Itunes and the Asus to rip CDs. Seems Itunes wont recognize the Asus while Make MKV is ripping a movie. Odd.

Good optical drive. About the size of a Harry Potter book. The on switch in the back was confusing because you have to slide it left/right instead of flicking a switch or pressing a button. Eject button is a little weird, too. It's not obvious and you have to press it towards the top of the button for it to register.That said, it reads DVDs and Blue-Rays (not 4k UHD). Works well with third party software for digitally archiving your personal physical media collection as advertised. I have not burned a disk yet and probably won't because that's not why I bought this. I can't compare the read/write speed to other drives because this is the first I've had, but it feels fast. There have been a small handful of DVDs where it couldn't recognize it, but I can't say that's not because the media is old.

I got the Blu-Ray drive because I needed a drive that could burn Blu-Ray discs. (Obvious, right?) I already have a DVD burner that has worked fine, but I wanted to use discs that have more storage capacity. So this drive was delivered and it worked fine for the first week or so that I used it. I used it to burn Blu-Ray discs as well as DVD9s. I liked the fact that it burned a DVD9 faster than the other DVD burner I had.I didn't need to use it for a few weeks after that, so it just sat there unused. Then I needed to use it again to back up some larger files, but I was only needed to use a DVD9 disc. So I inserted the DVD9 and after about 4 minutes the drive popped it out with an error message about a write error. I tried another and got the same result. These DVD9 discs were the same ones I have used for a while because I purchased a stack of them and haven't used them up yet. They worked fine before on this burner, so why not now? I tried a disc in the other DVD burner and it burned the files just fine the first time.I had noticed that the Asus drive will seemingly randomly disconnect and reconnect every once in a while. It seemed strange, but I didn't see that it made any difference, so I ignored that it did this. Perhaps now, I'm thinking, this might be part of the problem. Who knows -- I certainly don't know enough about these devices to determine that. All I know is that it no longer works.I logged on to Amazon and completed the form to request a return. When I submitted the form I got a message saying that I would be contacted by the seller within 48 hours. Well, that was over a week ago and no contact. I've purchased Asus products before. They're good products. Like any manufacturer, however, sometimes things don't go as well as you'd like. so I don't have a problem with the fact that the drive doesn't work. I just have a problem that the seller, Premier Audio Video, doesn't respond to requests for a return. Nothing. Not an email asking for more information -- just nothing.So buyer beware -- If you get a product that works fine, you will likely have no issues. But if you have a problem with the product and want to return to Premier Audio Video, I hope you have better luck than I do trying to communicate with them.