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Belgium, Brussels
1 Level
663 Review
37 Karma

Review on ๐Ÿ”ฎ Enhanced Optical Drive: OWC Mercury Pro 16X Blu-ray, 16X DVD, 48X CD Read/Write Solution by Jason Page

Revainrating 5 out of 5

Works great burning M DISC BD-Rs with macOS Sierra

I am satisfied with everything I have purchased from OWC and this is no exception. This is a really good burner. The body is heavy and constructed like a tank, which helps keep vibrations to a minimum. You can definitely hear the hard drive spinning, but that's true of every optical drive I've ever used (starting with my APC external SCSI CD drive in 1994). There is a power switch on the back of the drive so you can turn it on only when you need it. This does not turn off the power supply, which continues to draw a small amount of power even when the drive is off. The drive came with two blank BD-R discs in DVD boxes. It also included a link to download two programs: Smile Software's DiscLabel (for creating, printing and sharing CD and DVD labels, case inserts and DVD cases) and Prosoft Engineering's Data Backup 3 (a utility that lets you backup, restore and sync your data). I haven't downloaded or tried any of the programs yet. I use this burner with a 2013 iMac running macOS Sierra and Apple's built-in data disc burning software. I burned 20 Verbatim M DISC BD-Rs (single layer, 25GB capacity) with one failed burn (verification failed). Successful entries were made with minimal software startup (Activity Monitor and Finder only). The failed recording was run with additional software (Firefox with many tabs and windows open). I suspect the typo is due to the extra load on the system from running Firefox. Make sure the minimal amount of software is running and you should get reliable results. This can be a bit annoying, especially if you have a lot of discs to burn, but it's a bigger problem when the computer is transferring the data to the disc than it is to the disc itself. I haven't tried burning DVDs or layered BD-Rs yet burn. Pros: Solid build, solid performance, M DISC BD-R burning, includes some software for macOS and Windows, product description on Revain is accurate. Cons: Reliable recording. requires minimal software running on a computer, physically much larger than the Apple USB SuperDrive (which only handles CDs and DVDs), does not include DVD or Blu-ray Video Disc burning software.

Pros
  • Blu-ray Drives
Cons
  • Long Delivery Time