ASUS Brings External Blu-Ray Drive to CeBIT 2011

ASUS is one of the companies with the biggest collections of products on display at this year's CeBIT expo, but it seems it is not done with its releases yet, having also delivered a certain Blu-ray drive.

The 2011 edition of the international CeBIT expo is currently in effect in Hannover, Germany, meaning that companies from around the world are showing off their various items.

Of course, there seems to be a sort of shortage of news even with this event, since Intel, AMD and NVIDIA didn't have that much to show in terms of new hardware, but ASUS, at least, did not come without a sizable collection of electronics.

In fact, the outfit produced such things as a 3D monitor, the ROG Rampage III Black Edition motherboard and such items as graphics cards (GTX 580 Platinum Matrix) and, of course, tablets.

It also seems to have come up with a strange idea involving shipping motherboards in boxes shaped in such a way as to act as PC cases.

Now, it is found that the company also prepared a less unusual product, namely an external optical drive suited for content backup and management, besides just multimedia playback of course.

The device in question is an external Blu-ray drive dubbed BW-12D1S-U and which has both support for 3D and the USB 3.0 SuperSpeed interface.

That said, it can write Blu-ray disks at 12X speeds, which is double the rate achievable on external drives that communicate via the USB 2.0 port.

Additionally, ASUS implemented 2D to 3D conversion capabilities, as well as DVD video upscaling.

Needless to say, the same product can read and scribe data from and on a large number of other optical disk formats.

Unfortunately, the formal press release held no information of any sort on when and where sales will start, or what price the ODD will sport when that happens.