4K UHD Drives That Deserve Your Concern

What Are Friendly 4K UHD Drives?

Normally, Friendly 4K UHD Drives refer to regular Blu-ray drives that can read BDXL media but do not implement AACS2 protection. Though unable to be used with official software, such 4K UHD drives allow any software with a regular AACS1 host certificate to read UHD disc data. Typical example is LibreDrive, an optical disc drive (applicable to DVD, Blu-ray and UHD) intended for accessing disc data directly without any restrictions or transformations enforced by drive firmware. Therefore, a LibreDrive will never refuse to read data from the disc or declare itself ‘revoked’. Another external 4K UHD drive, LG BE16NU50, also called USB drive, is highly recommended to read UHD disc data. However, with respect to DVDFab users, UHD Friendly Drives mean those 4K UHD drives that allow backup software like DVDFab UHD Copy and UHD Ripper to read data from UHD discs and proceed with follow-up backup tasks. On the contrary, those 4K UHD drives that do not allow DVDFab UHD Copy and UHD Ripper to read disc data and finish backup tasks are called unfriendly 4K UHD drives.

What to Do with UHD Unfriendly Drives?

Since there countless 4K UHD drives on the market, there might be times when your purchased so-called ‘4K UHD Friendly Drive’ proves to be unfriendly when it comes to copying or ripping UHDs. Why? Actually, the existing firmware inside the 4K UHD drive is incompatible and prevents UHD backup software reading data from UHD disc, let alone copying or ripping UHDs for personal use. What to do with UHD unfriendly drives? On this occasion, you need to blaze a new trial. Maybe, most users tend to update the firmware manually to achieve the features of UHD friendly drives. Nevertheless, this is not the perfect solution. After all, updating firmware manually possibly damages your UHD drive and void the warranty. Even if you resort to professional tool, such operation might suffer from failure.

Best Solution for UHD Unfriendly Drives: DVDFab UHD Drive Tool

To avoid possible failure, here comes a sure card to fix your problem. DVDFab UHD Drive Tool is designed to downgrade unfriendly firmware to UHD friendly version so that DVDFab UHD Copy and UHD Ripper can read disc contents and further copy UHDs to hard drive or onto computer, or even rip UHDs to digital formats that can be played on multiple devices with professional 4K UHD player like PlayerFab and 4K Ultra HD TV like Samsung NU8000.

More Info on 4K UHD Blu-ray Drives 4K UHD Blu-ray discs are new type of Blu-ray discs that are not compatible with old drives (made before the second half of 2015), just like BDXL unable to work with non-XL drives. In 2015, some LG Blu-ray drives came with new hardware design, new front (bezel) and started to "see" the content of UHD discs. Typical of these were WH16NS40 and BH16NS40, with SVC NS50 on the label. They're good enough to work with DVDFab, therefore called UHD friendly drives. Since Asus serials, like Asus BC-12B1ST and Asus BW-12B1ST, are re-badging LG drives, they also inherited the update. Hence, new drives of those older models are compatible with DVDFab (see the list below). To ensure safe purchase, please look outside North America and find the same drive sold as BH16NS55. The best of this batch is USB 3.0 drive called BE16NU50, highly recommended. However, most friendly drives have a bug: once UHD disc is inserted, if it's not used for more than 2 minutes, the drive enters standby mode and will not read the disc anymore. One of the most direct and simplest solutions is to eject and reload the disc. Anyway, be confident that there will be a workaround for such defect in the near future. Somewhere in 2016, LG released some official UHD drives, starting with BU40N and BU50N. Buffalo also released a re-badged BU40N in Japan. Those official UHD drives are very stable and strongly recommended. Finally, LG released the first internal official UHD drive, WH16NS60, in US. Pioneer UHD drives released in early 2017 were not supported at the moment, but may be supportive in the future.

Warm Tips: never update your UHD drive to any new firmware that LG or Pioneer may release. Otherwise, your UHD drive may not work with DVDFab anymore. Always bear in mind as long as your UHD drive works compatibly with DVDFab, there is need to update the firmware.

UHD Official Drives:

LG WH16NS60 (Internal, Firmware: 1.00)

Buffalo BRUHD-PU3 (External, USB, Firmware: BU10)

LG BU40N (Internal Slim/Laptop, Firmware: FR07, TST0, BU10, CA03, A100)

LG BU50N (Internal Slim/Laptop, Firmware: GE02)

UHD Friendly Drives:

LG BE16NU50 (External, USB, Firmware: 1.01) (Recommended)

LG WH16NS40 (Internal, SVC Code: NS50)

LG BH16NS40 (Internal, SVC Code: NS50)

ASUS BW-12B1ST (Internal, Manufactured 2015+)

ASUS BC-12D2HT (Internal, Manufactured 2015+, Firmware: 3.00)

ASUS BW-16D1HT a (Internal, Manufactured 2015+, Firmware: 3.01)

LG BH16NS55 (Internal, Firmware: 1.00~1.02)

LG WH16NS58 (Internal, Firmware: TST5)

ASUS BW-16D1H-U A201 (External, USB, Manufactured 2015+, Firmware: A201)

LG BU30N (Internal Slim/Laptop, Firmware: 0217, 0245)

If your drive is already with the latest firmware version that is not backup-friendly, you can use DVDFab UHD Drive Tool to downgrade the firmware to the previous one. Check out the supported list below:

ASUS
BC-12D2HT
BW-16D1HT
BW-16D1H-U
BC-12B1ST b
HL-DT-ST
BE16NU50
BH16NS40 NS50
WH14NS40 NS50
WH16NS40 NS50
BH16NS55
BH16NS58
BH14NS58
WH16NS58
BU40N/N
BU40N/O (Buffalo)
BU40N/D (Dell)
BU40N/C (NEC)
BU50N/V (Lenovo)
WH16NS60 UH12NS40 NS40 BD-only
BP55EB40 NB50 BD-only
HP HLDS
BU40N/P (HP)
BU50N/P (HP)

Note that the above 4K UHD drive list will be constantly updated in the days to come.