I have been having problems with my disk drives since I replaced my motherboard a year ago. My hard drives worked but my 2 CD writers did not work nor did my external DVD writer. So I decided to buy something that was internal (due to costs) and used serial ATA (a newer connection that my hard drive is connected to.) I think my problem with the board was with the parallel ATA (the old CD-Rom and Hard drive connection) so I wanted to avoid that if at all possible. Well none of the internal DVD writers had SATA, just Parallel ATA. So I looked at the Blu-Ray drives and found that they were SATA connection drives. It was $50 more but I said heck with it and bought the more expensive option.


This is an internal Blu-Ray disk player that can read Blu-Ray disks, and read/write DVD/CD. The speeds listed are
Maximum Write Speed: 4x DVD+R DL; 4x DVD-R DL; 16x DVD+R; 16x DVD-R; 40x CD-R
Maximum Rewrite Speed: 8x DVD+RW; 6x DVD-RW; 24x CD-RW
Maximum Read Speed: 6x BD-ROM; 16x DVD-ROM; 40x CD-ROM (taken from Bestbuy.com)


It requires a 3.2 GHz processor and 1 GB ram.


It comes with some software;
Power2Go, Instant Burn (DVD/CD writing software)
Power Backup (Data Backup Software)
PowerProducer (Authoring Software)
PowerDVD (movie playback software)
Cyberlink advisor ( tells you your hardware and if you can play Blu-Ray)


And it comes with some hardware
-Serial ATA cable
-Mounting Screws


And the Blu-Ray disc drive works with XP (which I have) as well as Vista.


There is no head phone port or volume wheel on the front.


Installation
Installation took about 5 minutes. I just removed the old drive and old connections and just slid this one in the same slot. My case locks the drives in without screws so I didn't need to remove or loosen anything. I then connected the supplied Serial ATA cable and the standard power cable (power cable is part of the case/power supply). I started the computer up and my computer recognized the drive and installed the appropriate drivers right away. I didn't have to do a thing.


There were no connections to the graphics card. I am using a NVIDIA GeForce 850 GT with an analog connection, 2MB memory, and powerDVD. I have the capabilities of having a digital connection but I don't have the monitor for that yet.


I went ahead and installed the software and that was also incredibly easy. Some of the software does have a trial feel to it (and you can get them upgraded for a price), but you can watch Blu-Rays right out of the box. I've watched Blu-Ray's using PowerDVD with no problems. And the picture is absolutely beautiful. There really is no going back once you cross that line.


I used the supplied Insta-Burn software and burned a movie onto some blank DVD disks. The movie was an hour long, was AVI format, and barely fit on one disk (4.7GB). The software was not intuitive but it isn't that difficult either. Just be patient when you first start working with this piece of software. Once I got going, it took about an hour to burn a DVD for play on a standard DVD player (4.7gb disk). The DVD also played perfectly at my work site.

I also burned a CD-RW into an audio disk.  It was about 70 minutes long and took 18 minutes to burn.  It performed flawlessly and the program was easy to use.  Once again, nothing to complain about.

It does have Lightscribe capabilities if you are looking for that feature. It just means you can burn images on specially made DVD disk faces. Just put these disks in face down so the laser can work on them. I tried to mess around with it and the user interface just isn't all the easy to use. I probably will never use this feature.


I've also watched DVD's on it and they played flawlessly. But I wasn't all that impressed with the quality of the movie. It was like watching a JPEG movie. In fact the quality from Netflix was of a higher viewing quality then my DVD's. Not sure why.


Now the Blu-Ray viewing experience is intense. Especially with a movie like Ghost in the Shell 2. The colors and details you see are just mesmerizing. In some older live action movies you can see the grains in the film itself. The player has played any disk I put in it flawlessly with no problems. I have also had no problems with my burn projects as of the date of this posting.


I had problems with some of my burned disks being read in some other drives including the one at work. I tried those same disks and found it worked perfectly on my pc. I ripped 13 tracks and it took 160 seconds which is about what it normally takes on my DVD burner.


I also got a CD-RW disk that did not work on my old burners and I went ahead and loaded it. It loaded up perfectly and wanted to see if it would re-burn. I went ahead and did that, took 30 minutes to create a video. It stored a 40 minute video. And it worked perfectly.

Summary
This is an internal Blu-Ray disc player that also burns DVD's and CD's. It is easy to install and use. Even the most inept computer person can install this device as long as they know how to use a screw driver. I am very pleased with this purchase.

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Recommended: Yes

Amount Paid (US$): 140
Operating System: Windows