Logitech’s speedy and afforadble Blu-ray drive for your Mac

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You needn’t spend a fortune to enhance your Mac Pro with a fast Blu-ray drive to burn high-definition movies and store large backups. Logitech Japan has unveiled an affordable Blu-ray upgrade kit cryptically named LBD-A12SAK/MW that features a 12x Pioneer Blu-ray drive and additional software support.
The drive weighs in at 1 kilo, requires 16 Watts of power, and connects via the SATA interface for a theoretical data transfer speed of up to 1.5GBps. Billed as “the industry’s fastest” Blu-ray solution for your Mac Pro, it goes into the top optical drive bay on your machine. The official specs tout support for up to 24GB of data on a single-sided single-layer BD-R disc or up to 50GB of data on single-sided dual-layer BD-RE media. You can also burn to DVD-RAM, DVD-R/RW, DVD + R / RW, and CD-R/RW media as well.
More than ten times the DVD storage will be ideal for backing up large iTunes and photo libraries, your App Store purchases, and Mac applications. The drive appears as a regular writable volume on your desktop and is recognized as a burning-capable device in iDVD, iTunes, and other standard software.

The accompanying software includes Roxio Toast 10 Titanium with Blu-ray burning support that lets you create high-definition BD-Video discs in 1080p from Final Cut Studio projects. BD-Video discs can be later played back using Blu-ray players or PlayStation 3. The Blu-ray video creation in Final Cut Studio is achieved via a dedicated plug-in, which is sold separately.
Unfortunately, you cannot put the drive in a Mac Pro’s bottom optical drive bay, only the top slot works, but you may be interested to know that it works on PCs as well. The LBD-A12SAK/MW went on sale earlier this month exclusively via Logitech’s online store. The kit costs ¥24,800 (about $290), which includes the software and a one-year drive warranty.
 
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