OWC Mercury Pro 16X Blu-ray, 16X DVD, 48X CD Read/Write Solution

I had to completely change my review cause i was inaccurate! long story short dont buy wh16ns40 LG drives from china they are decade old MT1939 frankenstein drives pieced together to appear new. MT1939 drive are not UHD friendly and can't be cross flashed to be friendly. Anyways! So back to this drive. its a BH16NS40, (similar to the WH16NS40/WH16NS60) It has a non UHD compatible encrypted 1.05 firmware. but its a MT1959 platform which mean the firmware is down gradable to make it UHD friendly with available tool off the internet. it works great once downgraded to 1.02 firmware for UHD discs with makemkv. it took mine around an hour to rip one. these MT1959 based drives becoming increasingly hard to find due to no longer being made so if you want a UHD friendly drive thats reasonable in cost then get it wile you can! my guess is these guy have old stock still. And yes this enclosure can be used to downgrade the firmware. its really well built with a 3 AMP DC adapter and works perfectly for burning dvd's/blu rays which is ive tested and had no issues with! i recommend it!

I recently came across some DVD's that have data I wanted to extract. Back when I loaded the files onto said DVD's, CD/DVD drives were commonplace on PC's. Well, my five-month-old PC doesn't have a disc drive. While I'd gladly pop the cover off the tower and install a drive myself, the PC is still under warranty, and as I've had issues with this particular brand of PC, I want the warranty valid should I need to use it. I bought one of the countless slim, single cable DVD drives here on Amazon and hated it. Since the drive's single cable managed both current draw and data signals, the drive would get starved for power and shut down for a split second, but it was long enough to interrupt all attempted data transfers. I'm relieved that none of my DVD's were damaged by this, but it did give me a good scare. I decided I needed a drive that had a separate PSU and hoped that this choice would free up the USB connection for dedicated signal transfer. I'm just a casual electronics tinkerer, so I'm not going to authoritively state that my thought process is correct. But it seems to be the case; as I state in the review title, this drive has been so smooth. I'll confess that I balked at this drive's price tag, but unless someone pours funds to make discs bleeding edge tech again, computers are not going to be sold with disc drives again, so I reasoned this purchase may pay off in the long run. I haven't had this drive for long, but I can say it's been great in the short term. The drive is shockingly quiet, given that I have it on a shelf that seems to amplify vibrations and harmonics. It doesn't matter if I pop in a CD to retrieve an old CAD file from my trade school days, or a DVD that's loaded to full memory. This drive quickly and easily reads any disc I've put into it, and it doesn't interfere with my PC's basic functions. For example, when I would leave the single cable drive connected to my PC, my PC would take painfully long, literally minutes to index recent files when I opened File Explorer. And I don't have many files on this PC! In stark contrast, I've had this disc drive pulling data off a DVD, with a music player running, two Internet tabs up, and am able to open File Explorer and instantly see my recent files. So, I have to say from my experience and examination, this drive is worth it's price. Not only have I been very pleased with its performance, but I find the hardware of good quality too. I haven't popped this drive open and don't intend to do so, but the main enclosure is cast and brushed aluminum, and the drive's face and disc tray are smoothed plastic. I'm very glad I have this drive now!

Reviewing the bay only enclosure (no drive). I recently retired my old desktop tower which had internal bays for optical drives, and I wanted to be able to use with either my Linux server (which lives in a rack), or my Windows/Mac laptop on my desk. Since I already had an optical drive (LG WH16NS40 flashed to BD-RE WH16NS60 1.02 for those who care) I bought this enclosure on recommendation and it's *almost* flawless. Looking at the pictures though, I think the version of this that does include the drive, may coincidentally be the drive I already own. The construction and design is beautiful. Robust and the number of screws provided is verging on insane. If we ever have an earthquake, this drive will survive. Connecting it up was simple. One connection. Drive slots into the enclosure. It comes provided with power and a USB 3.0 cable. The USB cable is fine, it could be longer but it's nice that it was included. Plugging it in to the Linux server it was immediately recognized and read a Blu-ray quickly. Great. Here's where the "almost" comes in. It wouldn't read a DVD. The DVD was fine, I have other drives that read it on the same system. I initially thought I'd screwed up an update, or the laser had died (different color lasers are used for different types of disk, so it's possible the Blu-ray would work but DVD wouldn't and vice-versa). I tried a variety of different discs that I knew to be good and some of them would work, but most of them wouldn't. I was about to order another drive when I remembered I was going to eventually house this on my desk. Plugged it into the Windows 11 machine and... DVD read. Flawlessly. Every single time. Going back to the Ubuntu box, dmesg logs show it was timing out talking to the USB, so I suspect there's an issue either with the controller on the system or on the enclosure. It may also be the firmware on the drive. I don't know. Computers are weird. Just know your mileage may vary. Either way it's been a workhorse on my Windows PC and I'm happy with it (Mac works fine too). Oh, and moving it around from place to place to do all this testing was super easy too, so points for portability.

Makes it easy to use a 5.25" optical drive on modern computers without internal bays. Simple setup and works reliably.

This is the one to buy to rip your physical media (DVD/BluRay/UHD/4K) first flash your firmware back to 1.2 (search for: forum.makemkv). It is basically a WH16NS40 so flash firmware directly to > WH16NS60 1.02MK I have been ripping my disks flawlessly. Solid product, well built. The power adapter is a little funky, as you have to pull down a tab while inserting the plug adapter. Took me a minute to figure it out, but I am a caveman.

Finally replaced my old Dell XPS desktop that had two optical drives, DVD & Bluray player/burners. Unfortunately, no one builds computers today with an optical drive, so I bought the highest rated external one I could find, the OWC Mecury Pro. It is plug and play on my new Alienware desktop and is performing perfectly. Very quiet and smooth. Very happy with it!

Outstanding--plays all forms of optical discs. cd. DVD, Blu ray harry well built unit.

I purchased the empty enclosure (no drive) and paired it with an LG WH16NS40 Bluray drive. The enclosure is very well made. The outer shell is aluminum and the inner tray that holds the drive is stamped steel. The LG drive fit perfectly -- took perhaps 5 minutes to assemble. The power supply is rated for a full 3 amps. Many enclosures and docks come with a 2 amp supply, which is usually enough but can be marginal and cause problems with some drives. Kudos to OWC for not taking any chances. I tested with regular 25gb BD-R, 50gb BD-R, 25gb BD-R Mdisc, 8.5gb DVD+R, 4.2gb DVD+, and 700mb CD-R media. All worked perfectly, at full speed (as allowed by particular media), and passed read-back verification with zero errors. That's all a compliment to the LG drive, of course, but also says the Enclosure's USB-to-Sata bridge (an ASMedia ASM1053E) is working well. I am very happy with this enclosure, and would highly recommend it for anyone who wants to host a full-size, full-speed optical drive in an external USB 3.0 enclosure.