Some time ago I installed a Blue-ray burner in my Mac Pro (early 2008 model, MacPro3,1), did the homework at the time and selected and installed a LG WH12LS38 in the bay below the factory installed drive (a Pioneer DVR-112D hooked up to to the ATA bus). I found some instructions online and the install is pretty simple. You need to pull some fans out to get at things, and the drive hooks up to one of the two spare SATA ports on the motherboard. Take the faceplate off the drive, put it in the bay, hook up power and SATA cables, and the drive shows right up.

I had no problem burning CDs and DVDs with the new drive, but recently I tried to burn some files to a BD-R and I do not appear to be able to do this from the Mac OS (running the latest version of Mountain Lion now, 10.8.2), I get a message along the lines of not enough room on the disc, even though there is plenty of room. I was about to give up, but then figured I might see if I could burn a BD disc from Windows 7 running in Parallels. My Parallels setup defaults to the upper/factory optical drive, but it was simple to point it at the BD drive by changing the CD/DVD 1 setting in the device configuration window. Drag the files to the disc, right mouse click on the drive icon to select burn, and off to the races! I am using Phillips 6x BD-R discs and I set the burn speed to the lowest setting, 2x (based on my experience burning DVD DLs I get no coasters when I use low burn speeds). And once the disc has been burned I can also access/use the files from the Mac OS (after quitting Parallels, which when running ties up the BD drive).

PS – Might be that Toast would work from Mac OS, but Toast is expensive and I don’t really like it, the install puts files all over the place.