Blu Ray for MAC Pro's

Hi -
just some reference info, for those of you that want to save some money.

I just installed the new MCETech Blu Ray DVD-R for the MAC Pro. MCETech doesn't make anything. It's off the shelf products that they package, and dramatically mark up. It requires no driver software (other than Roxio Toast, which you need anyway for a MAC Pro to do Blu Ray burning).

The actual drive is the (get ready, this is a mother of a model #) -
HL-DT-ST BD-RE HHW-H20

This is a SATA drive, which is incompatible with the MAC Pro that still uses a parallel ATA (IDE) interface. MCETech simply provides you with the Addonics ADSAIDE IDE to SATA bridge card, which is $19.99 on Amazon. Nothing is even scratched out, or relabeled to hide the original manufacturers of this stuff.

It looks like if you do this by yourself, you will also need a short parallel IDE cable to connect between the Addonics board and the short Apple internal cable that dangles off the back of the native CD. There are no installation instructions with the MCETech drive (neither are there any instructions on their website), so I failed when I first did the install, because I could not figure out how to make one drive the MASTER CD, and the other the SLAVE CD. After putting on my reading glasses, I saw that there was a jumper on the Apple (Sony) DVD-R, and I moved the jumper to SLAVE, and everything worked fine. After searching at home for the Addonics card, I saw that Addonics has detailed instructions on their site, on how to make their adaptor either the MASTER or the SLAVE device.

Considering that MCETech doesn't give you any installation instructions (even on their website), you might as well do it yourself anyway.

Bob Zelin