Blue-ray Burner

 

Guide Note

A Blu-Ray Burner is a device that allows you to create a Blu-Ray DVD or CD.

Fast Facts

1. Blu-Ray is a high-definition DVD format
2. Uses a blue violet laser to read and write data
3. Blu-Ray beat HD-DVD in the format war

Blu-Ray Background

Blu-Ray was created by Sony, first announcing them in October 2000. The project was made official in February 2002, with the first consumer devices reaching stores in July 2003. Blu-Ray and HD-DVDhad been in a format war, each attempting to be the standard for high-definintion discs. The war ended when Warner Brothers announced in January 2008 that they would begin only releasing Blu-Ray DVDs beginning in May 2008. This announcement caused major retailers to quit carrying HD-DVD discs.

Blu-Ray Structure

Blu-Ray uses a shorter wavelength, 405 nm, allowing for much more data to be stored on a single disc. Dual-layer Blu-Ray discs have the ability to hold up to 50GB of media, which is more than six times the capacity of a normal DVD

Demand today

Storage manufacturers of all sorts have apparently selected June as "Push the Envelope Month." Last week saw Toshiba launch its first 1.8" 160GB HDD with a 3600RPM spindle speed. Toshiba claims the new models draw 33 percent less power than its previous 100GB model and the company is pushing this as a power-saving option rather than a performance product. Toshiba may have a tough sell here, as Samsung's 4200 RPM 160GB drive has already been out for a year.

Western Digital, as the company unveiled its new product tiers in the consumer Caviar line. This week also brings fresh enterprise announcements from WD, and a new hard drive capacity record in the 2.5" laptop market, this time from Samsung.

Samsung actually pushed out two new laptop drives this week, at capacities of 250GB (Samsung MP2) and 500GB (Samsung M6). The larger M6 drive will retail for a price of $299, while the smaller Spinpoint MP2 will sell at $199, with both drives hitting the market as we speak write. The M6 is a standard 9.5mm drive, spins at 5400RPM, and offers 8MB of drive cache, while the MP2 is a 7200 RPM (also 9.5mm) drive with 16MB of cache. Both drives offer native command queuing (NCQ) support.

As for enterprise storage, both Samsung and Western Digital announced new products this week. Samsung is launching a new version of its Spinpoint F1, the Spinpoint F1 Raid (aka Spinpoint F1R). The new drive features all the benefits of the original 1TB Spinpoint F1, with 334GB platters, 16-32MB of cache, NCQ support, and a 7200 RPM spindle speed. Samsung states that the drive is "designed for demanding applications such as database, email and web servers, super computing, software development, data warehousing, surveillance, call centers and nearline/backup storage systems." In this case, that had best be true. The consumer-oriented Spinpoint F1 is quite fast, nearly keeping up with WD's VelociRaptor in many tests, but the drive's performance fell dramatically in the multiuser benchmark IOMeter, as demonstrated by Tech Report.

Western Digital has an announcement of its own; the company is releasing its new "RE3" SATA enterprise drives. The new series of drives supports WD's Rotary Acceleration Forward Feed (RAFF) technology, which is designed to improve drive performance even when installed in a rackmount prone to high levels of vibration, a multi-axis shock sensor meant to detect what Western Digital calls "even the subtlest of shock events," and a dual processor. Unfortunately, there's very little information on what this last point entails; WD merely mentions the feature and notes that it "results in a 20 percent performance improvement over the previous generation."

Over in the optical market, Panasonic announced on Wednesday that it has built the world's first 6x Blu-ray Write-Once discs, or BD-R. The new discs will be available in 25GB and 50GB sizes, and are capable of transferring data at up to 216Mbps—20 percent faster than 16x DVD drives. The company expects the discs to be available in Japan by July; Panasonic-branded 6x burners are expected by September, 2008. No word on when drive or disc will formally hit the US market.

LG, meanwhile, may have Panasonic beaten when it comes to the 6x burner market. LG has already announced a series of USB2-compatible Blu-ray burners, and while they aren't cheap at $369 apiece, they're also expected to hit shelves very soon. NewEgg already lists the drive (though the model is noted out of stock). The new external drive is capable of writing to all forms of Blu-ray media (BD-R, BD-RE), the various DVD standards, and CD-R/RW. Interestingly, it's also a combo HD reader, with support for all of the formats mentioned above as well as HD DVD. LG doesn't appear to be talking up this particular capability, but you can find support for HD DVD listed under the unit's specification page.

Finally, if you're in the market for a personal storage device that's not going to run dry any time soon, Western Digital has refreshed their MyBook Mirror Edition product line with a 2TB option. The system ships with 2x1TB Green Power WD drives configured in RAID 1 for $549, or 2x512GB drives in RAID 1 for $289.99. My Book Mirror Edition is compatible with both Windows 2K/XP/Vista and Mac OS X (provided you're running at least 10.5.2), carries a three-year warranty, and can apparently be configured to run in Raid 0 or RAID 1. Why anyone would buy a disc backup solution that runs over USB 2.0 and then configure it for RAID 0 is beyond me, but the option is there if you want to do it.

Buffalo Technology announced yesterday a pair of new Blu-ray burners, one external and one internal which both offer the fastest speeds available currently, 8x.
The MediaStation 8x External Blu-ray Drive connects via a USB 2.0</A itxtvisited="1"> port or through a faster eSATA interface while the MediaStation 8x Internal Blu-ray Writer connects via standard SATA. There are no added drivers necessary for your system to read the drives and both can read and write CDs, DVDs, and BD-R/RE.
Both drives ship with CyberLink suite software which allows for H playback, Blu-ray capture, editing and authoring.
Both drives will be available within the next week and are priced $350 USD for the internal and $400 USD for the external, respectively.