BUFFALO MediaStation Desktop 16x External Blu-ray Writer for PC with USB 3.0. TAA Compliant. Plays and Burns Blu-Rays, DVDs, and CDs.
I was a little skeptical about seeing much improvement, I have a brand new HP PC that is fast as greased lightening and so I pretty much expected everything in it to be fast but that was clearly not the case for the Blu-Ray R/W unit that is internal SATA bus attached and should be far faster than anything USB 3 attached but not so.Pro’s:- Very Fast, hitting reads at 12x on DVD and 6.7x on BR, and everything else is even faster- True plug n’ Play for Win7 (I have not tried Win10 or Mac)- Lay-Flat form factor- Motorized Tray, no fumbling with a pressure hub on a flimsy tray- Heavy with good rubber pads, does not slide around even on a slick surface- For Win7 all needed drivers are already part of the OS, no need to load their bloatwareCon’s:- Crippled software that is 6 major revisions behind and lots of nag screens to upgrade (Cyberlink’s fault)- Count on buying the upgrade if you do not already own a BR authoring package (Cyberlink is a very good package, Roxio also if you prefer)The con’s were not an issue for me, I already have the latest CyberLink PowerDirector & PowerDVD, Roxio Creator and other packages to deal with the discs.Here is a BR and DVD comparison to the build in BR unit in my PC (All tests were done on USB 3, USB 2 will be a lot slower)- Rip a 30GB HD home movie from Blu-Ray — 16 Minutes on Buffalo / 34 Minutes on HP Player — (30.2 M/s @6.7x Read)- Rip a 4GB HD home movie from DVD — 4.5 Minutes on Buffalo / 22 Minutes on HP Player — (16.1 M/s @ 12.2x)I have not found any tools this drive does not work well with including, MakeMKV, CyberLink PowerDirector, Replay Convert, VideoReDo , VLC and of course WMC and WMP.It would be hard to be happier with the performance, the looks, size, and weight, for a desktop situation, this would not make a good portable drive it is took big and heavy compared to ones designed for portable use. Also keep in mind that for normal playback speed is not a consideration since everything plays at 1x.Reference Information: Tested on:HP Envy 850-065se, Intel i7 6 core CPU, 24GB RAMNVidia GTX 960 w/4GB RAMSamsung 1TB SSD boot driveSeagate 4TB SSHD (8GB SSD 4TB HD)Win7 – Ultimate