External BluRay Burners | Anyone Have Experiences To Share?

mooseducks86 · July 8, 2014

I am needing a blu-ray burner to archive huge amounts of raw photos. I am currently looking at the ASUS BW-12D1S-U.

I like that it is USB 3.0 - but would it really matter? Their older model is USB 2.0, it IS much slower burning, but also much slimmer. It won't be on my desktop all the time, I'll shove it in a drawer when I'm not using it. Which will be most of the time.

I do not want an internal drive because 1) my current case only has one usable bay, and it's in use 2) I have multiple computers, and the ability to bring it to work if I have to use one of those archived discs is handy.

My concern with the BW-12D1S-U is that it doesnt burn BD-XL (not that I would buy a spindle any time soon) but their older model (SBW-06D2X) does.

So basically, I'd like to know if anyone has used either of those burners, would you recommend them? Or a different one? I plan on using 25 and 50GB discs and burning on Windows 8.1, reading on Windows 7

edit: since nobody on here has used ever used external blurays, I guess I'll get the asus one mentioned above, NCIX has it on for $120 + $20 MIR.

mooseducks86 · July 15, 2014

Another unanswered post.

So I bought the ASUS BW-12D1S-U from NCIX. It arrived on Friday. I plugged it in, installed the drivers from their site, the first blu-ray I tried to burn with the included Cyberlink media suite (just a 25GB one thank goodness), crashed after writing 306KB and gave me a BSOD. Whooo! When I rebooted, I tried burning a copy of memtest86+ to a regular CD-R, and it worked fine.

I haven't gone back and tried to burn another BD-R yet because I haven't gotten around to it, and I think I'll do a little research on software and find something better. The cyberlink suite also adds 2 or 3 processes to boot, all of which are marked high impact.

It's sleeker looking than I expected, but I'm hoping there is a setting to turn off the blue power light, as I may just leave it sitting beside my monitor instead of sticking it in a drawer.