OWC’s Mercury Pro external 16x Blu-ray & Optical Storage

Conclusion

This has been quite an enjoyable exploration into Blu-ray optical storage.  It is definitely making a comeback especially for archiving and for HD movie creation, editing, and watching.  The performance of OWC’s 16X external Mercury Pro Blu-ray is excellent, easily matching and usually exceeding the performance of our internal ASUS Blu-ray burner.

It is pretty exciting to now be able create, copy and back-up HD movies, as well as permanently store and archive data using 100GB disks.  Although they are prohibitively expensive for consumers, we expect the prices to drop just as 50GB disks are now reasonably priced and 25GB Blu-ray disks are cheap.

We see great archiving software like DIGISTOR’s REWIND that is simple to use and mostly automated for permanent storage on Blu-ray disk.  And of course, PowerDirector 14 is an absolute standard for novices and professionals alike.  $84.99 is a great sale price for the Ultra bundle and older versions can be acquired for less than fifty dollars.

For its $167.99 price, the OWC Mercury Pro 16X external Blu-ray is built like a tank, and it comes highly recommended if you have multiple PCs, and it is especially recommended for Mac and Mac laptops.  Just make sure that you know that it does not come bundled with any Blu-ray movie software although Toast can be purchased from OWC as an additional option.

Pros

• The OWC 16X Mercury Pro 16X external Blu-ray has a Quad-interface, and it is particularly suited for Mac users as it uses fast alternatives to USB 3.0.
  
• It is ideal for Mac users including its silver color, and it is especially useful for archiving notebook data.
• The Mercury Pro is just as fast or faster over the USB 3.0 interface as our internal SATA ASUS 12X Blu-ray burner.
• It is built like a tank and has an external power adapter.
• The warranty is a solid 1 year, backed by OWC’s excellent service.

Cons

• Price. $167.99 is a little high compared to other external Blu-ray burners

The Verdict:

• Recommended!

We are giving the OWC Mercury Pro 16X external Blu-ray burner our ABT “Recommended” Award as it is well-designed, solid and durable, while being perfectly functional and easy to use for archiving out of the box.  And if you are a multiple PC user with a need to archive, and especially a Mac user, it is a perfect match.  Of course, with the appropriate software, it is excellent for watching commercial high-definition Blu-ray movies or creating them.

We also highly recommend DIGISTOR’s REWIND as easy to use archiving software with great automatic features!

Stay tuned, there is a lot coming from us at ABT. ABT has received Nvidia’s Frame Capture Analysis Tool and has set up our second PC with 4 Kingston HyperX SSDs. We are working with Perl scripts and the other complexities necessary to run this tool and we expect to have benchmarking results for you next month.

We also have Tt’s eSports DRACONUM Aluminum Mouse Pad on deck and will have an evaluation up for you this week. We also have Kingston’s mSATA drive waiting for an evaluation shortly afterward.

Please don’t forget to check our forums. ABT forum tech discussions are among the best to be found anywhere! Best of all, we have moved hosts and should have a more reliable experience for our visitors!