FastMac debuts Blu-ray Drive for your fast (or slow) Mac

Have $800 burning a hole in your pocket and a strange urge to create Blu-ray discs with your slot-loading Mac? All four of you might dig FastMac's new Blu-ray Drive upgrade, which can fit in a wide range of Macs, including the 17-inch MacBook Pro, Mac mini and Intel iMac. Apparently no love for the MacBook or 15-inch MBP, but the iBook G4 can handle it -- though it's hard to fathom stuffing one of these drives inside that oh-so-consumery laptop. The drive is rated at 8x DVD±RW and 1x BD-RW. You can write to 50GB dual-layer discs, and boot to the drive with OS X. FastMac calls the drive "Plug & Play," but the "plugging" end of that equation is going to take some adventurous exploits inside your Mac, by you, your hacker nephew or a trained computer repair guy. If you think you can stomach it, the drive is available now.

[Via MacMinute]

[(Unverified) Posted Apr 6th 2007 2:34PM]

when you can get a 500 gig drive for $150 WHY WOULD YOU EVEN THINK of paying for this crap? well you wouldn't cuz yur not tarded. right?

[CarlosE Posted Apr 6th 2007 3:44PM]

How does the price of a 500 gig storage drive relate to the price of a blu-ray burner?

[(Unverified) Posted Apr 6th 2007 3:16PM]

Wouldnt you think that people would actually want to watch Blue Ray movies on there computer. I dont know how they would do it though. I dont think the graphics card is powerful enough, or the resoultion is powerful enough. Maybe the Mac Book Pro, not the mini, no way the iBook, possibly the iMac, but I dont know about the graphicss card in the imac.So maybe for burning HD moveis? All that matters is that Blu Ray is one step closer to winning.

[(Unverified) Posted Apr 6th 2007 4:06PM]

I work with video and this seems like something that would be useful for me. It is a terrible thing to lose terabytes of HD footage because of a crap drive or a RAID that hasn't been properly striped. blu-ray allows for safe (albeit expensive), large-storage archiving, and when you have hundreds of hours and client's footage to look after it starts to make sense. otherwise this will be useless to anybody outside of the video / IT world.

[CarlosE Posted Apr 6th 2007 3:45PM]

Chris:

I have a MacBook Pro and the graphics card can support HD. The MacBook Pro can push a 30" LCD at HD resolution.

[erocm123 Posted Apr 6th 2007 4:25PM]

Carlos:

Almost all computers can output high resolution through DVI or VGA. Whether the graphics card and/or Mac's CPU can keep up with decoding the Blu-ray MPEG stream, in real time, is another question. I have a P4 3Ghz w/ 2GB RAM and nvidia 7600 GS (256 MB) and it chokes when trying to play HD-DVD. It takes some serious horse power to watch one of those movies on a PC. Just take a look at CyberLink's BLU/HD DVD system requirements info:

http://www.cyberlink.com/english/support/bdhd_support/system_requirement.jsp

[(Unverified) Posted Apr 6th 2007 3:49PM]

thats great. no i can burn all the contenst of my ibooks hdd on one disk! it even neraly fits two times!

its a bit expensive, but it would make me so cool. who else is able to burn all of their hds content at once?

end of sarcasm.

remember the first days of the DVD or even the CD? allt the people where saying omg thats expensive. who needs that crap when you can buy a 10 gb hd for 150$?
and in then years it will be "omg a 500$ 59^23 TB microwave-quantum-ferrofluid-nanostore? who needs this crap, when 150$ buys you a perfect 22^24 TB perpendicular-monkeyballostore!"

[CarlosE Posted Apr 6th 2007 4:37PM]

"useless to anybody outside of the video / IT world."

I can think of another use. Rip and burn blu-ray movies. :-)

[(Unverified) Posted Apr 7th 2007 3:40AM]

I guess this is one more reason to believe that the April 15 event will bring us BR capabilities in Macs.

[Zanzibar BB McFate Posted Apr 6th 2007 5:30PM]

Those specs explain the lack of support on the 15" MBP: yes it has the X1600 graphics card, but only 128MB video RAM.

Shucks, guess I am out of luck.

[Stranger2 Posted Apr 7th 2007 2:49AM]

pfuego, the fact that the MPB 15" ain't supported has nothing to do with it not being powerful enough. But you see, in order to keep the "magical" one inch thinkness Apple decided to use a non-standard dvd-burner. Instead of the common 12.5mm thickness the burner in the MPB is only 9.6 mm. The iMac, Macbook and 17" MPB all use the 12.5mm drives.

[aarond12 Posted Apr 8th 2007 10:45PM]

The 15" MacBook Pro cannot accept this drive because of space constraints, not the video resolution. The MBP can also run the 30" Cinema Display at its native (higher than HD) resolution.

The 15" MBP uses a 9.5mm high optical drive, hence the lower DVD burning speeds on its stock drive(4X) as compared to the 17" MBP with its standard 12mm drive (8X).

That said, let's stop worrying about formats that people can't decide on and get a 8X or 16X low-profile burner for the 15" MBP!

[(Unverified) Posted Apr 8th 2007 9:32PM]

"Mac 胞"
嗯嗯~~~這說法還沒看過耶。

[Rwilson Posted Apr 9th 2007 12:54PM]

I'd just like to remind everyone this is for data burning only on the Mac. Even though this same drive will play Blu-ray movies on PC, it is not possible on Mac yet! There simply is no software for it.

[(Unverified) Posted Jun 8th 2007 9:56AM]

The ability to play both BD and HD will be available in Leopard (Mac OS 10.5) according to the England version of Macworld.