Samsung SE-506AB External USB 2.0 Slimline 6x Blue-ray Writer and 8X DVD Writer - Black

Physically, a very solid piece of hardware, but it comes with a shovel-load of dodgy software that you have to uninstall.

In the box there is the drive itself, a weird looking USB cable that allows the drive to pull power from two USB ports, a DVD with software and a folded piece of paper showing how to connect to the two required USB ports.

When attached to Win7 64bit, the driver installs automatically and the drive just works, no further installs required. As a bluray burner, the drive works well and hasn't produced any faulty discs for me. Bear in mind that the quality of your media really matters, so if you're finding problems with one type of discs, buy some pricier, branded bluray blanks to see if this resolves the matter. Contrary to other reviewers, my drive has loaded dirty, scratched DVDs just fine, so this really is a full replacement for any earlier, external drives you may own.

On the included DVD is PowerDVD 9, amongst a heap of other Cyberlink products. You can only install these together. Obviously you'll want PowerDVD 9, as it plays commercial, encrypted bluray discs (AKA "films"), but you'll want to uninstall most of the other applications as soon as possible. Amongst these are an atrocious "media manager", a dreadful "label maker", two awful software packages for burning blurays, a forsaken "software launcher" for those who fail to successfully operate the Windows Start menu and more undesirable software from the shovelware department of Cyberlink. Thankfully, all of these can be uninstalled individually, without affecting PowerDVD 9.

On the software DVD there is also a link to update the drive's firmware. While the drive should arrive with current firmware, it is worth occasionally performing this test manually as the drive's firmware contain decryption-keys to play the most recent bluray films. If nothing else, check if you fail to play a new bluray movie.

Much touted by Samsung's marketing department, the drive also supports "AV connectivity mode". This does not turn the drive into a bluray player for your TV, as it lacks decoding hardware to actually play a movie. At best, probably connected to a Samsung telly only, the drive can show photos from whatever DVDs you pop in the drive. The sooner you forget about this AV connectivity mode, the better: This is an external bluray drive for your PC and for this purpose, it works well.

PowerDVD 9 is fully capable of playing blurays, so there is no need to upgrade, but it's worth mentioning that within the software is a link to a special PowerDVD 12 Ultra price, at £39 rather than £89 pounds. If you absolutely must have the latest piece of software, buy it through this link. By the time you read this, of course, Cyberlink will undoutedly have changed the destination for the upgrade link, so your mileage may vary.

One last note: Before you buy this drive, do run Cyberlink's "BD & 3D Advisor", which is freely downloadable from Cyberlink's website. This will test your hardware setup for HDCP compliance, and hardware muscle to ensure you can actually play bluray movies with the drive. Without a fully encrypted connection from player to monitor, blurays will not play and you will be left with a solid blu-ray burner and nothing more.

Its a good little drive and plays most disks with out a hitch so long as the disk surface is perfect. I have a few disks that have been mistreated over the years (DVD's opposed to Blu-ray) but they all play in my other DVD player and laptops without a hitch, however this drive can not load them at all. In fact the slightest mark or spec of dust and this drive refuses to load CD's and DVD, I don't have any damaged Blu-ray disks (thankfully) to test if this also applies to blu-ray. A little disappointed, but for a portable drive it is small, light and quite.

There are at the time of writing no reviews for this unit on-line so I thought I'd add something here.

(About me; I'm a software engineer with about twenty years experience, mainly on Windows using C. I've built a number of PCs from scratch, for myself and for others. I maintain Windows installations for a couple of friends using VNC - actually on in both cases PCs I built for them.)

The unit is physically well-made; solid plastic shell, curved edges (no angular corners) and comes with a two-headed USB to mini-USB cable, since the drive needs two lots of USB power to run.

I realised after opening the unit up that it in fact supports triple and quad layer BD-R disks! Panasonic have apparently -just- produced the first triple layer BD-R, which I cannot find for sale, so it's ahead of the curve, although I wonder if the support will really work when the disks actually become available - I mean, how did they test?

I plugged the unit into Windows 7 Professional 64-bit and it was recognized. I put a DVD in the unit (all I have with me here right now) and played the disk with Media Player Classic. The drive is *very* quiet in operation when playing and reading - I was impressed. (Addendum : I am currently, as I write, ripping a blu-ray. The drive is very nearly silent. There are no seeking noises; just a completely steady very quiet hum of the motor; this is the quietest drive I've ever heard).

I've not run any benchmarks, so I can say yet if the unit is particularly slow or fast or has any hidden issues; I've not tried burning anything yet, either.

Will add more to this review as I do things with the unit.

I've given the unit five stars now - the one improvement I can suggest is to do with size. The unit is compact - you won't think it big in any way - , but I there's room for making it a little smaller - I've seen a really small (DVD) drive from I think it Philips, which really was just barely larger than the DVD disk itself, and that set my expectations :-)

Addendum, 16th Nov 2011. I've been ripping DVDs. Using DVDDecrypter, the drive rips at about 6.0x.