I have this installed on a quiet pc. The drive is usably quiet as well but not silent. It is certainly allot quieter than a standard DVD rewriter drive I have. It has played many DVD's and blu rays no problem. It was easy to plug in and set up. It set its regions based on the disks I put in and set-up to play 1080p through HDMI output was uneventful. The colour is a touch lighter than by black case, but it is exactly the same colour as a different brand black DVD writer that I have. So the colour maybe a standard. The extras are PowerDVD and a sata cable. I was not impressed with PowerDVD. It required a large patch and has logins for different things that I don't necessarily want. I changed to Arcsoft Totalmedia Theatre and have been very impressed with it's abilities and simplicity. I am disappointed that Windows 7 does not just play Blu Rays through its media players due to it's well integrated media centre. Neither PowerDVD of TotalMedia integrates with media centre perfectly.