Japanese Logitec will ship two external Blu-ray Disc (BD) drives in the Japanese market later this August, equipped with IEEE 1394 and USB 2.0 interfaces.

The LBD-A2U2 (2.0) will be priced at 138,600 yen ($1206), while the IEEE 1394 version code-named LBD-A2FU2/WM wil cost 121,800 yen ($1060). Due to its interface, the LBD-A2FU2/WM is supports Mac OS X 10.3.9-10.4.7.

The drives are based on the Panasonic reference designs.

The specifications of the drives include 24x writing for CD-R, 4x for DVD±R DL 16x for CD-RW, 6x for DVD-RW, 8 X for DVD±R/+RW,5x for DVD-RAM and 2x for BD-R/RE (single-sided, single/double layer).

Note that although writing on BD-R/-RE media is supported underthe Mac OS X environment, play-back of BD-ROMs is only allowed under Windows.