Want to upgrade your PC with a spiffy new Blu-ray drive, and get up to 50GB of storage on a single disc? No worries. Swapping optical drives on a PC or Mac isn't really that hard--you just open up the computer (after powering it down, thank you), take out a few screws, pull out the existing drive, slide in the new one, hook it up, reboot, hope the plug-and-play drivers are recognized, install any drivers if necessary... and you're good to go. Most of the time. Of course, you might also spend all day, highlighted with pivotal moments on your knees, saying, "Oh God, why me?" Or you could use an external drive that will make the process painless.

Other World Computing (OWC), has introduced both new Blu-ray internal and external drive solutions, which are 100-percent compatible with both PCs and Macs; the external drives offer connectivity via FireWire or USB 2.0. At $559.99 for the OWC Internal Drive (with a standard IDE/ATAPI interface) or $649.99 for the External Drive, both include full retail versions of Toast 8 DVD/CD Authoring software with Blu-ray support, and they even come with two 25GB Blu-ray media discs. Either way, you'll be ready to go HD.

Post by Peter Suciu