Pros: As I said in the title, does not have riplock so it will read discs at their rated speeds. I've seen up to about 30-40 MB/s. Great for ripping all those blu-rays you own to your NAS to watch on your Raspberry Pi 3 or Nvidia Shield TV or whatever else you got going on.

Cons: This bad boy is noisy, don't expect quiet operation here. I personally don't care about the noise since it's all about the performance.

Other Thoughts: I definitely recommend this product to anyone trying to convert their physical media to digital, Blu-rays and DVDs alike. It'll do the job like a champ. Sadly, I can't give you the write performance/quality of the drive since I don't use it for that function. You'll have to ask someone else. Definitely will be buying another if I ever need one.

Pros: Love it does and works like a charm with my setup Cooler Master HAF 932 Advanced - High Air Flow Full Tower Computer Case with USB 3.0 and All-Black Interior

Cons: None

Pros: Installs well and BIOS picks it up immediately. Scans quickly and so far error free! Great unit for great price!

Cons: Should have come with a cooler. I fixed it using the cooler from an old vibration football game though!

Other Thoughts: Grab these when they come around on sale again!

Pros: It was a good price, and it seems to work consistently as a regular DVD R/W, just not with blu-ray disks.

Cons: I saw another review that they tried 2 drives and neither would not recognize blu-ray DVDs. I'm wondering if they were locally burned blu-rays as I have a similar problem. I'm also on my second drive after RMAing the first with the same exact problem with the second as the first, so it doesn't appear to be a manufacturing defect. The second drive fails to be able to read the same blu-ray disks as the first.

Both the drives I received could read some, but not all, blu-ray discs. The disks it couldn't read were disks burned on another drive in a different computer. I don't have that many blu-ray disks, but they all I have work fine with multiple blu-ray Players and with a LG WH16NS40 blu-ray drive in another computer. The disks the ASUS drive has trouble with are not even recognized as blu-ray disks. The computer locks up for a minute retrying disc reads until the initial load fails and it reports no disk in drive.

Net, not the drive you want even at the low price point if you actually want to do stuff with blu-ray disks.

Other Thoughts: I'm still debating spending the time and energy to try to see if I can exchange it for an LG drive as the one I have has no issues for any of my DVDs, blu-ray or not. Other option is just to give it to my son who doesn't care about blu-ray capability. Very disappointing for an ASUS branded device as it is such a strong brand name.

Pros: works

Cons: Can't find program to watch movies with, Windows only has a dvd player for windows 10 and it does not support blue ray playback. The rest of the programs online I will not trust. Can't find free program to play the movies I bought. Everything looks like spyware. Just see what I see and you will know.

Manufacturer Response:

Dear Valued Customer,

Thank you for your time on posting this review, we are sorry to hear your experience with the ASUS optical drive. Please allow me to assist you.

Can we have a detailed information about the unit's issue? unfortunately for blue ray, the software doesn't come with the unit. Based on the unit's specifications https://www.asus.com/us/Optical-Drives-Storage/BC12B1ST/specifications/ it supports Windows® 7, Windows® Vista and Windows® XP.

For further assistance or if you want to discuss this matter with me, please email me at customerloyalty@asus.com and put case #N160290654 in the subject line for a reference. I'm here to help you and all others with these issues, as our customer loyalty department dedicated to bringing a resolution to all issues related to our products.

If ever you want to call our representatives please check link below for the contact numbers.

http://www.asus.com/us/support/CallUs

Thank you for choosing ASUS.

Best regards,
Jerry
ASUS Customer Loyalty

Pros: Does what it's supposed to. No issues.

Cons: none

Pros: NA

Cons: 1st drive read 3 Blurays, then stopped registering discs (windows still sees the drive - but says there is no disc.) Tried every fix, upperfilters in regedit, firmware etc. Will not register any DVDs either. OK - maybe a lemon. RMA.

2nd drive -EXACT SAME THING. I can hear the drive spin up, but for some reason after reading 3 discs it no longer registers a disc in the drive of any kind. (even the discs I already know that it has been able to read in the past 2 hours).

I like ASUS products but the quality control on this drive seems lacking. I plan on RMA'ing 1 last time, and possibly ordering an LG as a backup drive in case this fails again. Because I have been down over 2 weeks with no drive at this point waiting for all the shipping and approvals.

Pros: Plug and play setup. Once i installed powerdvd blurays played great

Cons: none

Other Thoughts: yes people you need software to play blurays, plenty of ways to get that software :)

Pros: Extremely fast. Good price. One-stop-shop of drives.

Cons: Louder than I thought.

Other Thoughts: When it engages, it's the loudest part of my PC by far. But as I rarely use it, well worth the brief noise for the speed it provides.

Pros: Works well as DVD player, I haven't tried to burn blue-rays yet seems like from other people's reviews you need some additional software.

Cons: I installed this in a Gigabyte GA-G41MT-S2PT motherboard and for whatever reason the MB only recognized it in SATA 1 position (slave) with the hard drive in SATA 0 position (master). It didn't recognize the drive in SATA 2 (master), maybe this is how it is supposed to work but it wasn't intuitive. When it was in the wrong position the drive would just turn the blue indicator light on and off at a regular interval non-stop.

Other Thoughts: I didn't need to install any other drivers to get this to function correctly.