ASUS Powerful Blu-ray Drive with 16x Writing Speed and USB 3.0 for Both Mac/PC Optical Drive BW-16D1X-U

As of: 03/2024, the drive is fine. Once in a while it won't read a disc, and once the computer is restarted it'll work. Although that could potentially be the operating system, but on a Mac, that kinda seems unlikely. To update firmware, you need to be on a Windows machine. That's so 2000's. If you're a Mac user, find a friend with a windows computer. The drive door seems to rattle at times making you think it's the drive mechanism, but it's just its thin plastic door. And the gears for the door opening and closing gets a little noisy after about two months. I might try and put electronic grease on it later. For digitizing my DVD/CD library to a NAS... AWESOME! With MakeMKV these two are a awesome combination. The speed is great too. It blows those thin, cheap, push to close three times, drives we are all used to now. This one is a full automated tray (open & close) like they were when CD-rom drives first came out. The power button on the back is terrible; they tried to make it carved and angular like the design of the case, but that makes it hard to grasp and slide it on and off. Also, there's a HUGE blue LED (1.5") on the top that says "Ice On Fire." At night... IN YOUR FACE! They could have saved money by not having all that fancy designing elements. Looks very 80's inspired. All that said, for what I'm putting it through (constant ripping) the drive is worth it. For a once in a while drive... get something cheaper.

Archived 179 CDs in one day without a single issue, and the nightbefore. The drive stayed stable, quiet, and reliable the entire time. Also works great for Blu-rays. If you’re digitizing your collection, this is a solid choice.

The drive itself is great! I tested this with music CD's, DVD's, and Blu-Ray discs and it was able to play all of them perfectly fine. Quality of course was limited to the disc quality itself, like in the case of DVD's that are older. The main issue I had with setting up the drive was that it's not truly "plug-and-play," meaning that a true "plug-and-play" is literally plug in and on and ready to go. I wasn't used to an added power switch on this but once I found that on the back and turned it on a few seconds into the setup everything was good. I am the type of user that won't use that switch beyond making sure it's powered on. This doesn't play 4K discs out of the box, but I've seen online how you can hack it to, but I have zero interest in hacking my device, nor worrying about buying 4k discs. I got this specifically for Blu-Ray movies that I already own along with a few DVD's and music CD's. Now the reason I took one star off the review. They created this reason in their bundled software choice that was clearly chosen because it was cheap for them to license without truly caring if you received current software relevant to current computer hardware and operating systems. Power2Go 8 is dated as released November 3, 2011, CyberLink PowerBackup 2.6 is dated as released October 29, 2014, and Nero BackItUp 2017 Essentials was clearly released in 2017. I'm honestly just annoyed that they provided software from 2011, 2014, and 2017 for a product I just purchased yesterday, December 29, 2025. All of this software is genuinely old and outdated. Power2Go 13, the latest version from Cyberlink was released in 2019, and even that is starting to show its age, but that is the current offered version from Cyberlink. So my take is, enjoy the drive for being great hardware, but ignore the disc that comes with it completely and find more relevant and current solutions. I think that this fact also should mandate that they drop the product price, because being realistic, they are only offering hardware with outdated software that "functions" but isn't at all coded properly for current windows or macs, hardware or operating systems, let alone security risks. I already own the PowerDVD 24 software for playing discs as I already have a DVD external drive that's held up very great. So adding this drive into that software is already super easy for playback. As for a burning solution that I can count on getting updated I'm going to go with Cyberlink's Power2Go 13. I'm annoyed that I have to buy current software for a product I purchased yesterday. I also feel like they are pricing this for 4K use knowing a lot of users probably will hack it to make it work for that. However that is also unfair pricing for those of us genuinely just wanting a quality player that isn't crazy priced like this one is, and especially since it isn't set up for 4k as purchased. In the end I'm glad I have this, but it's is significantly over-priced. I haven't had this long enough to speak to how durable it is, but for what I've tested so far it seems reliable. It's a box so it's a lot bulkier than my other external drive, but the device connects easily and works pretty quickly with proper software.

Nice external unit. Works well, decent burning speed. I use it for burning offline data archiving of those things that you just cannot lose like family photos etc as part of a multiple backup strategy . Drives no matter if they are platters or SSD's do have a failure rate. No issues with open source OS and apps in accessing, burning, reading and so forth. Currently recommend. Will have to see how it works out long term.

Bought this to use M-Discs for long term backup. The drive is rather heavy, but that doesn't bother me. It feels stable in place, which helps my confidence for the disc burning. The drive was detected immediately in Windows 11. I was able to burn a disc quickly and read the disc without issue. Given the rising costs of computer storage, this was an easy purchase for me. Great value.

I got the Blu-Ray drive because I needed a drive that could burn Blu-Ray discs. (Obvious, right?) I already have a DVD burner that has worked fine, but I wanted to use discs that have more storage capacity. So this drive was delivered and it worked fine for the first week or so that I used it. I used it to burn Blu-Ray discs as well as DVD9s. I liked the fact that it burned a DVD9 faster than the other DVD burner I had. I didn't need to use it for a few weeks after that, so it just sat there unused. Then I needed to use it again to back up some larger files, but I was only needed to use a DVD9 disc. So I inserted the DVD9 and after about 4 minutes the drive popped it out with an error message about a write error. I tried another and got the same result. These DVD9 discs were the same ones I have used for a while because I purchased a stack of them and haven't used them up yet. They worked fine before on this burner, so why not now? I tried a disc in the other DVD burner and it burned the files just fine the first time. I had noticed that the Asus drive will seemingly randomly disconnect and reconnect every once in a while. It seemed strange, but I didn't see that it made any difference, so I ignored that it did this. Perhaps now, I'm thinking, this might be part of the problem. Who knows -- I certainly don't know enough about these devices to determine that. All I know is that it no longer works. I logged on to Amazon and completed the form to request a return. When I submitted the form I got a message saying that I would be contacted by the seller within 48 hours. Well, that was over a week ago and no contact. I've purchased Asus products before. They're good products. Like any manufacturer, however, sometimes things don't go as well as you'd like. so I don't have a problem with the fact that the drive doesn't work. I just have a problem that the seller, Premier Audio Video, doesn't respond to requests for a return. Nothing. Not an email asking for more information -- just nothing. So buyer beware -- If you get a product that works fine, you will likely have no issues. But if you have a problem with the product and want to return to Premier Audio Video, I hope you have better luck than I do trying to communicate with them.

I backup all of my Blu-ray movies to a Synology NAS, and then stream them to Raspberry Pi units running OSMC. My old external BR drive went kaput recently so I decided on this one, primarily because I don't care about portability as much, but I still want something I can move out of sight, since I switched to a mini PC (so, no tower for an internal drive, and the PC is also hidden from view in my office for a clean and clutter-free aesthetic). To test it, I ripped three discs - 1). Synchronicity on Blu-ray, 2) The Adjustment Bureau on Blu-ray, and 3). Jethro Tull "Heavy Horses" on DVD-A. Being used to ripping times for a Blu-ray that would read at 2.2x speeds with my old USB 2.0 drive, most Blu-ray movies would take about an hour to rip, and would lay down the data at about 5 MB/second. With ripping Synchronicity, I was surprised as this drive started up with the roar of a jet engine and then got busy, gaining speed the entire project, and ripped the movie from the disc in 9:23! So, as a weighted average, almost 7x faster than using my older USB 2.0 drive. I was impressed. The Adjustment Bureau is a different encode and a slightly longer movie than Synchronicity, and it did not get ripping as fast, but still much faster than my old drive could, and completed the rip in 21:19, or about 3x faster than before. Still impressive. The last test was performed on a DVD-A (a format that is now mostly defunct), on the lossless stereo PCM layer of Jethro Tull's latest remix release of their 1978 album "Heavy Horses." For those interested, ripping stereo PCM lossless audio in 24-bit/96kHz to FLAC is a long, arduous job for any computer, and requires more processing and time than even ripping a 1080p movie (both audio and video). I'm an audiophile with great audio equipment, so I go for the highest resolutions I can The music most people stream is maybe one tenth the quality and information of these rips, but with a superior audio setup, make all the difference. The album is about one hour long with a few bonus tracks, and normally would take about 45 minutes or 1.25x with my old drive. This drive however got the job done in 20:33 with zero corrections, jitters, etc. Flawless. So basically I'm super pleased. For an external drive this thing is BIG, but that doesn't bother me, as I will be putting it away in a closet when not in use. Yes, the power switch is in an odd location on the back but who cares, it works tremendously. I'll be ripping a few normal audio CDs this weekend (to FLAC), and I suspect I will get superior read speeds as well. In terms of burning discs, I will update the review after I have had the chance to test that aspect. I had to write this prematurely because of how impressed I was with such fast read times for ripping video and audio codecs to a NAS from an "external" drive. A+ so far! Buy it.

little loud, but works great. It's definitely a little bulky though. it's just a plug and play system just like what was told. and it's read just about everything i've thrown at it.

I staarted by burning at the lowest speed as possible to break it in as I proceeded to burn several discs I increased the burning speed and had no issues burning blue ray discs. there was no noise on the machine. burning dvds at 16x was fast. was able to look inside and found that it was belt driven easy to replace if had to. over several days was able to go through a 50 pack of blue rays with no issue. thankyou very much for producing such a lovely item. the data cord could have been a little longer

This Blu ray drive is the fastest I’ve ever had. But although it has a usb 3 port, it came only with a usb 2 cable. So I bought the usb-c cable separately.

The ASUS BW-16D1X-U Turbo Drive Blu-ray Writer has worked flawlessly since setting up, (which was dead easy btw). It has 16X writing speed and has USB 3.0 connectivity.. It caters to BluRay disks, DVDs and CDs also, a great all rounder. I'm a film/video post production professional and I have to admit I'm a bit of an ASUS sort of guy, and have an edit workstation built around ASUS hardware.. so it was the first brand I checked out on looking for a BluRay burner. - absolutely 5 stars!

Funciona excelente y muy rápido para grabar, sin ningún problema para reproducir BD

as described