Review on High-Performance Blu-Ray Player Laptop External USB DVD RW Burner Drive: Unleash Superior Media Capabilities by Edwin White

System tested (so far): Dell T3400 - Intel Core 2 Quad / 4GB RAM / Windows Vista / USB 2.0 (System over four years old) The product is made of plastic but doesn't feel fragile. Weighs about a pound (I think). Of course, like any electronic device, don't throw it around. I see how some people use their smartphones, tablets and laptops and it drives me crazy. Excellent packaging. Included is a mini-CD which I thought was software to at least play Blu-Ray movies, but superficially it just said "DRIVER". Windows Vista automatically recognized the drive when it was connected. No additional drivers were needed. The "DRIVER" disc was inserted into my regular DVD-RW drive and the contents read without any problems, but the setup file did not run and gave an error on startup. Again, I could be wrong about the packaging with no playback software. Go to Plan B to play Blu-ray movies. Google has provided help with various resources that will show you how to enable Blu-ray playback with VLC Player. Follow the instructions which took 5-10 minutes. A newly released Blu-ray movie disc was tested on a 22-inch 1080p LED/LCD. Worked great. By connecting both USB cables (one for power / one for data transfer), data could be read faster, the movie loaded and played within a few seconds. Skipping back and forth across the entire disc only took about 1-2 seconds to continue playing the movie. So far I am satisfied with this product. For less than $35, you can get a portable Blu-ray drive that you can easily transfer between computers. UPDATE: I decided to investigate the properties of this drive in Windows. The hardware shows: Optiarc BD RW BD-5730S6 USB device. Googled the model, including searching for just "BD-5730S6" It looks like the device in the outer shell is a Sony Optiarc drive. Many search results showed that this drive is a Blu-Ray burner. I'll be buying some blank BD-Rs to test this out and update this review. UPDATE 2: I received a blank BD-R media. I tried a quick test using NERO to burn regular files/create a data disc. Received an error message stating that the disc cannot write to this media type (BD-R). Tried Ashampoo Burning Studio 2010 Advanced which successfully burned the data disc to BD-R. Tested to confirm by accessing files directly from disk. UPDATE 3: I bought a second drive from the same seller at a great price and to see if I'm still lucky enough to have another burner. The drive has arrived but unfortunately there is an HP BD-ROM drive inside the case. I can not complain. On the outside, they all look the same thanks to the outer shell that surrounds the internal drive. The internal drive may be different, and I got what the seller promised: an external BD-ROM drive. The good news is that the second drive did indeed come with a disc containing Blu-ray movie playback software. Movies played fine after following the instructions in the README file. I'm relieved because the VLC player mod has stopped working and I couldn't find a solution online.