[markw10]

I am buying an external Blu-Ray drive and have been looking at one by OWC that has USB 2.0, Firewire 400, 800, and eSATA connectors. I've really become interested in a drive that is made by Buffalo Technologies and has a USB 2.0 and eSATA connector. The issues are as follows:

-Will USB 2.0 handle the bandwith well or do I really need something such as Firewire or eSATA?

-Most of all, is there an adapter to convert an eSATA connector such as on the Blu-Ray drive to a Firewire connector that I could plug in the front of my Mac Pro?

[Cold Warrior]

All are going to transfer data at decent speeds. USB is the slowest; Firewire 800 is much faster and eSATA is even faster. However, it's pointless to use eSATA with a firewire adapter because your speeds will be limited to FW speeds. You also need to consider the write speed of your Blu-ray burner, because it may not be capable of writing data faster than your USB or FW could supply it.

[markw10]

Thank you for the information. I am looking at an 8x burner. I just wasn't sure if USB 2.0 was good enough. How fast is eSATA? I know Firewire will limit it but thought I may need firewire's speed over USB. Of course if USB 2.0 does it I'll be happy with that.

[CharlesS]

eSATA is the same speed as the SATA connector you would have been using if the drive were internal. Until someone comes up with a better internal connection than SATA, it is currently physically impossible for any other connection to be faster than eSATA to connect your drive.

With that said, I’d be somewhat surprised if USB 2.0 or FireWire couldn’t handle the needs of a burner, but then again I don’t deal with Blu-Ray stuff, so I could be wrong here.

[Simon]

8x BR is 36 MB/s. What's for sure is that that's a performance USB2 won't deliver over longer periods of time. On Macs the highest I've ever seen USB2 perform sustained is just below that. FW800 or eSATA will however be sufficient.

[Eug]

Yeah, I've NEVER had a USB 2 enclosure give me 36 MB/s. FW400 enclosures don't give me that either though. As Simon said, to max out an 8X (or 12X) Blu-ray drive, you'll want FW800 or eSATA.

OWC sells USB 2 / FW400 / FW800 / eSATA Blu-ray drives BTW. I believe those drives are based of this enclosure.



Fugly, but if it works, it works. (I haven't tried it though.)



It comes with a fan, but with my previous optical enclosures I've just unplugged the fan and haven't encountered any problems, I guess since 99% of the time the drives are just idle and cool anyway (unlike hard drives).

[markw10]

Thanks for the advice. The 8X Buffalo drives are a lot cheaper so I'd prefer that but yet it's on eSATA and USB 2.0. I like all the connectors on the OWC drives. They are more but 12x. I may contact them and see if I can still get an 8x version for cheaper. Do you know if the fans are noisy for these? Like you I may try unplugging the fan.

[mduell]

USB2 is good to 4x (maybe 6x on good (non-Apple) USB implementations) BluRay, but not 8x or 12x.

$80 FW800 enclosure + $180 8x burner or $220 12x burner