OWC Mercury Pro 16X Blu-ray, 16X DVD, 48X CD Read/Write Solution

I’ve been using external enclosures for over 25 years, and purchased this to house a UHD blu ray r/w drive. Construction is very solid, as it’s basically a chunk of aluminum with a metal tray to which you bolt your drive. Assembly couldn’t have been easier, and the rubber feet are soft without being spongy. As another reviewer put it: not as well finished as a MacBook, but still very nice. When attached via USB pass thru to a Windows VM running on a RHEL host I was still able to do firmware updates on my drive, which was quite nice (vs having to do some sort of direct attachment). The power switch allows for resets of the drive quickly, which has come in handy when I’ve gotten into a bind (of my own creation, not any fault of the enclosure). Highly recommended if you need an external drive for any of your projects.

Nice quality aluminum enclosure with rubber feet, screws , power supply , USB 3 cable included. If you need a Blu-Ray burner just buy the LG drive bundle! Its a very good drive with windows 11 and fast.

TLDR: Pros: Solid, good looking, and nice heavy feel All required hardware and cables included Recognized instantly and works (only tested with Linux) Cons: Provided USB 3 cable very short (about 2 feet) Dumb PCB engineering prevents most drives from fitting. The unit itself looks great and you could probably stand on it without ill effect. I took off one star because the case is very short inside because of a bad design choice. I know, the listing has inside length but theres really no reason for it to be that way. The outside of the case is 8.375 long and 8 inside but the stated inside space for the drive is 6.77. I bought it hoping my exactly 7 LG Bluray/DVD-RW would fit, and it barely did. Its against the printed circuit board (PCB) in the left corner and very slightly at an angle - enough so that I could only secure the drive on one side - and the bezel is not flush with the face of the case. All that is fine with me so Im keeping it. However, had they used a long narrow PCB instead of a 2x3 rectangle, or positioned the PCB vertically instead of horizontally the case would easily take a 7.5 drive. Really, a very poor design choice and for no benefit except maybe they saved a few cents in production by not having to produce a custom PCB. Just dumb for a product they charge almost $50 for. You could probably hack your way to a longer drive by removing the PCB and remounting it inside and threading the USB and power cable inside or move the PCB outside and thread the SATA cables inside. Obviously, you would need to enclose the PCB for the latter. The USB cable is a very nice heavy cable with ferrite beads (aka chokes - the round lump near the end of some cables) at both ends. But its only 2 feet long. Great for a laptop or computer on your desk but if your computer is on the floor in a tower, youll need probably need a longer cable unless your placement is very close. In case you need a longer cable, I attached a picture of the special end of the USB A:B cable youll need. The newer Superspeed USB 3 A:B cables arent as common as the older types so you may not have one in your box of cables like I did.

I have been happy with everything Ive purchased from OWC, and this is no exception. This is a really nice burner. The enclosure is heavy and built like a tank, which helps to minimize vibration. You can definitely hear the disc spinning, but that’s true of all optical drives I’ve ever used (going all the way back to my external APC SCSI CD-ROM drive in 1994). There is a power switch on the back of the drive, allowing you to power it on only when you need it. This does not switch off the power brick, which will continue to consume a small amount of electricity, even with the drive switched off. The drive came with two blank BD-R discs in DVD cases. It also came with a link to download two pieces of software: DiscLabel from Smile Software (for creating, printing, and sharing CD and DVD labels, jewel case inserts, and DVD covers) and Data Backup 3 from Prosoft Engineering (utility that allows you to backup, restore, and synchronize your data). I have not yet downloaded or tried either piece of software. I’m using this burner with a 2013 iMac running macOS Sierra and Apple’s built-in software for burning data discs. I have burned 20 Verbatim M DISC BD-R discs (single layer 25 GB capacity) with one failed burn (verification failure). The successful burns were done with minimal software running (Activity Monitor and Finder only). The failed burn was done with additional software running (Firefox with lots of tabs and windows open). I suspect that the failed burn was due to the additional system load from running Firefox. Ensure that you have minimal software running, and you should get reliable results. This can be a bit annoying, especially if you have many discs to burn, but it’s more of an issue with the computer keeping the data flowing to the drive than an issue with the drive itself. I have not yet tried burning any DVDs or multi-layer BD-R discs. Pros: Solid build, reliable performance, burns M DISC BD-R discs, includes some software for macOS and Windows, product description on Amazon is accurate Cons: Reliable burns require minimal software running on computer, physically much larger than Apple USB SuperDrive (which only handles CDs and DVDs), does not include software for burning DVD or Blu-ray video discs

Works exactly as it should. I added one of the nice LG BR/DVD drives into it, never had a single problem. Never had any connection or transfer issues or disconnects. Wouldnt recommend this but it even worked, very very carefully, for an external HDD holder for a few days while I was upgrading and transferring files to new HDD.

OWC Mercury Pro Bluray Read / Write There is not much to say, except this is a high quality device. I have a Dell OptiPlex desktop computer. Just simply plugged the Bluray re-writer into a good USB port, plug the power pack into a 120volt outlet, flip the power switch on and youre ready to go. Has a high quality brushed metal case with an easy to load disc tray. Good work guys! I would buy it again. I wish all devices work well as this does!

I returned the first unit I got. The SATA power had poor quality solder points on the enclosure control board which didnt feed enough power to the Blu-ray drive. The second unit worked like a charm. My Blu-ray drive was 6.5 inches deep so if you have something longer like 7 it may not work. OWC customer service was good at troubleshooting. Overall not a bad experience.

This product by OWC is built for Apple/ Mac users. It will work without having to download drivers or jumping through added steps like products built for Windows but will also work on IOS products. Save yourself some time and extra set up headaches and get this product if you are a Apple/Mac user.

I bought this external drive to copy my CD collection into iTunes in AIFF lossless audio format. Although I have an internal DVD player, my computer sits inside a cabinet in my desk and the CD player/reader faces away from me, which makes it inconvenient. So I bought this external reader to place on top of my desk for the 900 or so disc task at hand. I measured the reading speed of the same disc at 2:57 on this unit, versus 5:17 on my internal reader. Great time saver! However, I had to download software to read Blue Ray discs because Windows 10 doesnt support them.

Purchased this as I had an internal Pioneer Blu-Ray burner that wasnt being used. Build quality is very good and power is supplied by a wall wart. Unfortunately, Pioneer drives wont work as theyre just a bit too long to properly insert into this enclosure. Ended up going with an LG drive instead which installed as expected with very minimal space between the back side of the drive and the PCB that holds the SATA and power connections. Other, shorter depth internal optical drives will work fine. Double-check the depth of your drive before ordering.