Customer Reviews

Velocity Micro VMbluDrive Blu-ray Disc External Optical Drive (Black)

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

At first impression, this drive appears to work quite well - it is very thin and light.
It works with Windows 7, plug and play for DVDs and CDs - just plug it in and pop in a disk.
I have not used it to write any DVDs or CDs yet, but have used it to load software from DVD and play Blu-Ray disks

It comes with 2 installation CDs -
- Encina CD Maker - I'd suggest skipping this install - I find it easier to use Windows to write data CDs and DVDs which is all it does.
- Cyberlink Blu-ray Disk Suite - This is required to play BluRay disks, and appears to allow building of video DVDs, including a simple movie composer.. This is absolutely worth installing. Be patient, the installation took a long time for me.

I'm using this with a new Dell Inspiron 11 11.6-Inch Obsidian Black Laptop (Windows 7 Premium) Which comes with Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit. As I mentioned, I haven't run into any incompatabilities, and haven't run into any problems yet with power consumption or trouble with any transfer rate on the disks.

Will update if I find more.

Update: 1/29/2012:
Wanted to update this review, as I think there's some mis-information out there about this drive.
I switched to Mac last year, and since the only results I could find from web searches told me that this drive was not compatible with Mac, I never even tried it.

This weekend I had a little time, so I decided to hook it up. I had intended to go ahead and install the driver software under Parallels 7 in a Windows 7 image, and see if I could get it to run, but instead ended up seeing what the state of blu-ray software for Mac was.

Long story short - I was able to get the drive to work with both MakeMKV and Mac-Go's Blu-Ray Player software. The drive is fully recognized under Lion, and while there is no native Blu-Ray Codec for MacOS - both of the above solutions help to solve the problem just fine. With MakeMKV and a mid - 2011 iMac 21", I was able to get rip speeds at nearly 4x on blu-ray.

Still happy with this little drive!

So for anyone out there who's wondering - this drive DOES work on the Mac!

The Velocity VMbludrive looks great. It is thin and light. It works out of the box as just a CD/DVD rom. Just plug and play. You need to install the drivers for other functionalities like playing BluRay disks. As stated by other reviewers, playing BluRay disks needs more computer power than playing regular DVDs so expect issues with lesser computers like netbooks. In fact, the Velocity VMbludrive works perfectly well with my desktop running Vista. It also worked fine with my Asus netbook running Windows 7 Home premium, except for playing BluRay. The device comes with a software (BD advisor) that will check your system for minimum requirements to play BluRay. I ran BD advisor on my netbook and it detected a few incompatibilities, including CPU power (my netbook runs an Atom 270 1.6ghz; I have 2 GB of ram).

Overall, this is a very good external CD/DVD player/burner and BD player (the cheapest external BD player I came across), except if you only intend to use it with a netbook in which case you might not be able to use it as a BD player. You then would need to look at much cheaper external CD/DVD player/burners without BD capabilities that need lesser computing power.

The VM Drive is suitable for the intended use, have no issues with the product.

Remember to always check your minimum system requirements for any hardware you purchase for your system. Blu Ray disk player requirements differ from your standard CD DVD Rom/Ram.

I found this product to be everything reported. Unfortunately, my lap top does not not support the blueray function. It did play regular DVD's with no problem. The only thing I would suggest Amazon place a link on the product page so people can test to ensure their laptop meets the minimum requirements to use this product.

I plugged the VMbluDrive into a powered USB port with just one of the provided cables and was able to immediately play a blu-ray movie using Nero Media Hub HD 10. (Well, I did get some kind of patent activation for Nero. Apparently that happens the first time you watch a blu-ray on it.)

It's quiet once it spins up. Did not get warm enough to feel. Only took about a minute and a half to load Sin City. Took about 3 minutes to load Prince of Persia but that is slow on my stand-alone blu-ray player, too. It's nice when something that claims to be plug'n'play really is!

I agree with the review by R. Jordan. Was pretty jazzed up reading the ad, took the hour to install all the software, and couldn't get it to play BluRay. Looked at the info on the requirements that you get to after the hour and it tells you it won't work, and found my laptop didn't have the necessary stuff. The ad said it would work on "any" laptop. Well, the regular DVD portion does, but not the BluRay. My laptop already plays DVDs, and I'm not going to buy a new laptop just to see BluRay on a small screen. Sent it back immediately. I don't know how to access the info about system requirements before buying this product and spending the time installing it. If you don't have a fairly new laptop, don't be surprised if this doesn't work on your machine.

I ordered this drive to attached to my Laptop to play Blu-ray DVDs. After going through the 1 hour plus install, I got a message that said it needed a compatible display, and graphics card. I have a Dell Inspiron 640m. The drive works ok, but no Blu-ray. If you look into the Technical and Product details on Amazon's website, you will not find anything about compatibility requirements. I was really mislead.
If I wanted just a DVD external drive, I could have paid a lot less.

Ok so I bought this item to watch Blu-Ray movies on my computer. My computer is a month old and everything was working perfectly until I connected this item. When I connected it to my USB port, the computer shut off and the light started blinking. I thought it was odd, I disconnected the drive and turned my computer back on to find out my USB ports were not working. Took it to the store to find that I needed a new logic board... GREAT! Just what I needed!

If I were you I would think twice before buying this item, just my 2 cents...

I just bought an ASUS Eee PC 1201N netbook from Amazon. I also got the VMbluDrive external optical drive. The netbook will not recognize the VMbluDrive. I tried it on my HP PC and it worked fine. I called both manufacturers and of course they blamed each other's products. Needless to say, I sent it back. I would be very worried about compatability issues with laptops and netbooks.