MCE Technologies on Wednesday announced the release of an internal Blu-ray recordable drive for Mac Pro and Power Mac G5 systems. It costs $699 and is shipping now.
The drive, which is user installable, can record up to 50GB on dual-layer Blu-ray disc media, at up to 2x (9MB per sec) on BD-RE discs. The internal drive has been fitted with a blue front tray-bumper to distinguish it from ordinary optical drives. The drive also records to and reads from all other standard DVD and CD recordable media.
MCE includes Roxio’s Toast 8 Titanium software, which enables Blu-ray disc support both in the Finder and in Toast. Toast 8 Titanium includes a feature called “Toast Dynamic Writing” that enables you to copy content to Blu-Ray discs in real-time just like a hard disk drive — you simply move files onto the volume and they’re copied on, unlike Finder-based DVD-R or CD-R disc burning, which requires you to burn a disc after you’re done filling it.
System requirements call for Mac OS X v10.4.8 or later.