Anyone added a Blu-Ray writer to an Acer 8943G

One of the few things I regret not getting in the 8943G is a Blu-Ray burner. Although I believe the European models did have this available, here in the States we're left to our own devices.

I'm just wondering if anyone has added an internal drive to the laptop, and if so what model and how difficult it was.

I was thinking about just going with an external burner, specifically this one here:

ASUSTeK Computer Inc.

However, I don't know if the external drives are any better or worse than just adding an internal drive.

Anyone have any advice or suggestions on the matter?

 

Its as hard as undoing a screw, sliding it out, unclipping your bezel, placing it on the new drive, unscrewing the hook for the screw at the back of the old drive and placing it on the back of the new drive, sliding it in and screwing it in place.

 

Replacing your regular drive with an internal Blu-Ray is easy however there are some advantages to buying an external one.
First of all internal BR writers are no faster than x4 while external ones are at least x6 which makes a difference when we're talking up to 25GB per disc.
Second advantage- you buy a retail product with full firmware support.
Internal drives are mostly OEMs and even of not these are rarely properly supported because these are mostly sold to notebook manufacturers rather than regular users and that's what producers care about.
Since BR market and number of media available is yet to grow/increase you’d like to have firmware updates that add support for new media to your writer (media specific write strategies)

 

This times a thousand. I still haven't been able to watch Toy Story 3 on my laptop because the firmware update needed to read the disc isn't available; I need to actually replace the whole damn drive to make it work.

 

Thanks for the replies, guys. Really, this is only for burning discs (mostly data), as the laptop already has a Blu-Ray player.

Still, it sounds like external might be the way to go. One of the things that's swaying me is the fact that most of the external devices seem to come with all the necessary software needed to make it work, whereas, from what I've seen, the internal ones need to have their software purchased separately. While my laptop has the required programs needed to play Blu-Rays, I'm not sure if that applies to writing them as well.

Any other input is greatly appreciated!

 

Hi,

This depends on the package. Internal drives are often sold as "bare drive" or OEM. But they are normally available as "Retail" also, and then software is included also.

If you only want to write data stuff onto your discs, then get ImgBurn for free. A very reliable piece of software.

Michael

 

Thanks, I'll look into that. At this point I'm still kind of leaning towards the external unit if for no other reason than I have something I can hold on to should my next computer not have a burner.

Thanks for the info, Michael. I'd heard of ImgBurn but never really explored what it was as I had other programs I used (CDBurnerXP mostly). However, the native Blu-Ray support seems nice so I'll definitely be looking closer at it once I decide on a burner.