With a growing number of mini-laptops packing NVIDIA ION graphics, it’s becoming more and more common to find notebooks that have no optical disc drives, but which are capable of handling Blu-Ray playback. The solution? You could rip your movies using another machine, but that takes ages. Or you could find a portable Blu-Ray drive that you can throw in your bag.
The Asus SBC-04D1S-U is a slim optical disc drive that can read Blu-Ray discs and burn CDs and DVDs. Aside from being slim and light, it has two pretty cool features. First, t’s BUS powered, which means you can connect it to your PC with 2 USB ports to turn it on without plugging it into a wall socket. And second, the pattern on the side of the disc drive glows when it’s powered up.
The disc drive doesn’t appear to be widely available yet (I couldn’t find it at the 5 or 6 electronics retailers I use most), but Google Shopping shows a number of vendors are selling it for between $175 and $200.
