Other World Computing (OWC) has announced the availability of internal and external Blu-ray disc drives for Macs and Windows PCs. The systems start at $559.99 for internal drives and $649.99 for external drives.
Blu-ray is a new high-capacity optical disc format that can store up to 50GB per disc, compared to 8.5GB for a dual-layer DVD. It can also be used to store High Definition (HD) video. Blu-ray drives are backwards-compatible with DVD, DVD-RAM and CD formats.
Left to their own devices, Macs don’t yet support Blu-ray discs out of the box, so OWC also offers the full version of Roxio’s Toast 8 Titanium software with the drives. It’s bundled in some configurations. Toast 8 Titanium adds Blu-ray disc recording capabilities, including the ability to burn Blu-ray discs from the Finder.
The internal drive configuration is a standard IDE/ATAPI drive. The external model features two FireWire 400 ports and a USB 2.0 port, and comes with cables. Two 25GB (single-layer) Blu-ray media discs are included.