ASUS BW-16D1X-U 16x External Blu-ray BDXL Drive with BD Suite Disc USB 3.0 Cable Power Adapter and Cord

Can't tell whether it's the drive or the software that comes bundled with it, but I have only been able to create one backup successfully. Now, the software that comes bundled with the drive, Cyberlink Powerbackup 2.5, stops responding completely only when I attempt to write to this drive. I don't understand why ASUS would bundle software with their equipment that doesn't even work. I went so far as to upgrade to Cyberlink PowerBackup 2.6 and updated it. Got the same results. Until someone figures out what's failing, I wouldn't recommend buying this drive.Update: Contacted Cyberlink technical support team and provided them with the data they required. They're suggestions about adding these two device drivers to my machine,"Download and install "Intel® 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family USB Enhanced Host Controller" driver under "System Components" section.Download and install "Intel® Management Engine Interface " driver under "Motherboard" section. "caused my machine to not recognize any of the USB devices that were attached, I also ended up having to do a system restore just to get it to boot up again. It's the software, and they don't know how to fix it.Update: Got Acronis True Image 2017 and it doesn't fail, but it doesn't recognize the drive size and asks the user if they want to retry, cancel or format the disk. What ever you do, don't format it. If you do, even with a BD-RE disc, it becomes usable. Tech support sent me Acronis True Image 2018. Tested it and got the same results. Their tech support got back to me and stated that it is a known issue with their software and they are working to resolve it.Another update: Found that Acronis Software works with up to a 50GB BD-RE disc. Also found that if Acronis software just tries to write to a 100GB BD-RE disc, it makes the disc unusable. As of this writing, I raised Acronis awareness of this, but I have got no real response that indicates that they understand this clarification.They finally contacted me again and have resumed the escalation and troubleshooting process.They got a good understanding of the problem and worked the issue. I can only describe their solution as "Booyah!" It worked. Those guys kick ass!

Reads whatever I throw at it. Didn't try burning because I don't need it for that, just read. Has no problem backing up my movies.Kinda big, but that is there in the description. Not really a problem.Note: I use this on my laptop. Have a power delivery type-c hub attached to said laptop (no power cord attached to it). This drive needs a lot of power over the usb along with the power cord it comes with for some reason. If I plug more than just the drive into the hub, nothing works. I just plugged it into the other side of laptop.- No, I did not try to plug in power for the hub. The cord for that is deep in a land that hasn't been seen by humans in years (behind tv desk thing.) I use that for when I use laptop for media center or steam game streaming in living room- No, I did not try just the drive itself in the hub. Didn't think about that till now and the laptop is WAAY over on the other side of the room. Besides, my external drive and mouse need to be plugged into it otherwise a cable mess appears and I can't use my mouse on my limited desk surface.If I had the chance to go back and order something else instead of this knowing what I know? Nope. I would order this again. This is great (for what I want.)If you are having problems with the drive

Very fast, but door is squeaky. The last one I bought the door became squeaky and the it quit opening. Hope this one isn’t going to do the same.

Speed

I like the drive and its performance. Unit itself is pretty big. But I knew it would be before I bought it. Portability is not a concern of mine. Cords/cables are plenty long enough for my use.I have used Asus customer support. It is absolutely excellent. Very responsive and knowledgeable. Some of the best product support I have experienced.Now the reason I gave it only a 4 star rating. I tried to register this drive to my Asus account for the warranty and support. It came up as already expired. It expired a month ago. So I contacted Asus about this. They said it was already registered to another user. What? I was given a returned or refurbished unit instead of a new one. Amazon did apologize and quickly sent me another unit that was guaranteed to be a brand new one.Make sure you have a compatible media player for blu-ray’s or they will not play on your computer. The standard Windows media player will not work.Update 7/3/24Asus customer support is now very disappointing. I reduced their rating down to 3 stars. After almost two weeks, I am still unable to register this new drive on their website. They don’t know why and are unable to resolve the issue.

Works just fine!

1/28/21I've had this drive for about 10 days now since delivery (counting today, when I write this), and, it seems to work pretty good so far. I have thrown 46 disc's at it. Most of the disc's that I have that I'm throwing at it are dvd rom type movie and tv show disc's, and I'm using dvdfab for copying. There is a on/off switch on the back of the unit, which I've seen a few reviews about the switch being hard to use, and, that is farily true. One of the 46 disc's that I've thrown at the drive was a bluray disc, there was no hesitation on switching over that I could see or tell. The only operating system that I've used the drive with so far has been windows 7, I've seen some complain about the idea that the drive didn't work with certain operating systems.9/14/22Ok, so, since having this for 4 months short of 2 years (getting this back in January of 2021), and it is still going strong. What I was talking about on my initial review about copying the dvds and stuff as I remember I didn't complete doing up to when I type this part of the review, in fact, i think I bailed on that idea. I did use the drive a fee days ago to burn some CDs (anyone remember doing that?), and it worked well.