Fastmac announced on Friday that is now shipping a Blu-ray slimline optical drive upgrade for the Apple PowerBook, iBook, MacBook Pro, iMac and Mac mini. The drives are user installable.
The new slimline, slot loading drive uses one of the fastest and most compatible Blu-ray mechanisms to provide up to 50 GB of storage on a single disk without sacrificing compatibility with standard DVD & CD recordable media.
Specifications: Fastmacis slimline Blu-ray slot loading optical drive supports reading, writing and re-writing to single and dual layer Blu-ray media at 1x speeds. The drive is also compatible with standard DVD and CD media and can write to DVD-R and DVD+R media at 8x speed in single layer and 2x speed in dual/double layer mode. It can rewrite to DVD-R and DVD+R media at 4x speeds. The drive also supports DVD-RAM reading and writing at up to 5x speeds and standard CD-R and CD-RW burning at 8x speeds.
Compatibile Macs include: iBook G4, iMac G5, iMac Intel, MacBook Pro (17-inch), Mac mini, PowerBook G3 Pismo, PowerBook G4 Titanium (667 Mhz or higher) and PowerBook G4 Aluminum.
System compatibility: Blu-ray burning requires 3rd party software such as Adobe Premiere CS3 or Roxiois Toast 8 Titanium, which enables Blu-ray disk support in the Mac OS Finder. Native support for Blu-ray burning within iLife & iTunes is expected in the future via Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, but cannot be guaranteed at this time. Mac OS 10.2.8 or later is required.
The drive is user installable and instructions for the installation are provided.
The drive is available immediately and priced at an introductory US$799.95. The drive carries a one year warranty and a 30 day money back guarantee. Fastmac recommends that users may want to keep the original drive in the event Apple warranty service is required.