BluRay player recommendation

AFAIK Blu-ray drives are not region locked, its the player software & movies that are (you can check the region of titles here - http://www.blu-ray.com/movies/search.php).

Also $145 is super freekin expensive. A external blu-ray drive should cost you around $45-$90. Internal ones being about $40-ish.

Get a 20 bucks USB powered tray one on Ebay. It will work fine.
IMO, the best experience is to extract the used streams into an MKV with MakeMKV. Takes about half an hour, and most of the movies I extract are 10-15GB. The program is free while in Beta, use Google to find the latest free serial in the MakeMKV forum.

You can also use MacBluRay player. As far as I know, this player does not care about region either. I stopped using it in favour of MakeMKV. It is nice to have the titles right at your fingertips without getting those fingerprints on the real discs.

Yep, I'd rip the disc using MakeMKV, compress it down a bit using Handbrake and store it on one of my 4Tb hard drives for easy access.

Simples

That drive gets good reviews on Amazon for use with Macs. The caveat is you will need to buy software to get it to work properly.

Here is the US Amazon page, read some of the reviews there to get a better idea of Mac compatibility.

http://www.amazon.com/Samsung-SE-506BB-TSBD-External-Blu-ray/dp/B00AO1XFM0/

As far as regions, according to Wikipedia region code management is done by the player software. So you can buy any drive you want.

MacGo is the recommended player. It is not region locked. Free trial, price is 39.95USD / 23.86GBP.

http://www.macblurayplayer.com/

You could use VLC or DVDFab according to someone in the question/answer section on Amazon, but you have to hack them to get them to work. MacGo seems the most straightforward.

I have these two working on different Macs:

MCE BD6XSLU2 Price: $129.00 (online orders)
http://store.mcetech.com/Merchant2/...BD6XSLU2&Category_Code=STORBD&Product_Count=2

Logitec (Not Logitech!) LBD-PME6U3LBK ~$130
http://www.logitec.co.jp/products/bluray/lbd-pme6u3l/index.php
This is available from electronic stores in Japan

They work great for playing and burning Bluray. However for DVDs they are region-specific (as advised above - this depends on the player - not the optical drive).