For those who don't want to drag around an external Blu-ray Disc drive with their Macintosh laptops, Fastmac recently released an internal slot-loading Blu-ray Disc drive that replaces the DVD drive.

Fastmac?s Blu-ray Disc drive works with several recent Macintosh laptop models, as well as the iMac and Mac Mini desktop systems. A list of compatible Macs are at www.fastmac.com.

Fastmac's slimline Blu-ray slot loading optical drive supports reading, writing and re-writing to single and dual layer Blu-ray media at 1x speeds. The drive is also compatible with standard DVD and CD media and can write to DVD-R and DVD+R media at 8x speed in single layer and 2x speed in dual/ double layer mode. It can rewrite to DVD-R and DVD+R media at 4x speeds. The drive also supports DVD-RAM reading and writing at up to 5x speeds and standard CD-R and CD-RW burning at 8x speeds.

Several third-party programs, including Roxio Toast 8 Titanium and Adobe Premiere CS3, can actually do the Blu-ray disc burning on the Mac once the drive is installed. Users can record data not only to Blu-ray Discs, but also to standard recordable DVD and CD media as well.

Sadly, the early adopters will not be able to watch Blu-ray Disc movies on their Macs. Fastmac says several companies are working on the software to do this.

The drive is available for U.S. $796.

In addition, the company released a 5.25-inch Blu-Ray drive for Macs. Fastmac's tray loading Blu-ray optical drive supports reading, writing and re-writing to single and dual layer Blu-ray media at 2x speeds. The drive is also compatible with standard DVD and CD media and can write to DVD-R and DVD+R media at 8x speed in single layer and 4x speed in dual/ double layer mode. It can rewrite to DVD-R and DVD+R media at 6x speeds. The drive also supports DVD-RAM reading and writing at up to 5x speeds and standard CD-R and CD-RW burning at up to 24x speeds. It is priced at $499.95.