Pioneer Blu Ray PC drives

[FarFarAway]

Pioneer have lanched their first Blu-Ray internal drive.

The drive is EIDE + molex for the minute, but it is expected that eventually the drives will be S-ATA.

This supports both Blu-Ray and DVD:

. The BRD-101A will read and write Blu-ray media at 2x and burn the various DVD formats at 6x to 8x speed. However, what this drive won't do is read or write regular CD-ROM media. This seems a strange choice, but if it wasn't possible to support all three major media formats, supporting Blu-ray plus DVD makes far more sense than Blu-ray plus CD-ROM.

So the end for CD-ROMs? I don't think so yet but certaintly game manufactorers are already starting to use DVD's as standard format so I would expect CD's eventually to be phased out (at least for PC use)

Info on burning Blu-Ray:

Blu-ray Disc v1.0 specification dictates that 1x mode will require a 36.5Mbps data transfer rate or approx 4.5MB/sec. At this speed, it would take 90 minutes to burn a full 25GB.

The specification for 2x mode doubles this data rate to over 70Mbps, halving the burn time to 45 minutes. As the format matures, burners are expected to reach 8x speed or more, writing the full 25GB in well under 15 minutes. To achieve this, drives will be nudging 300Mbps or over 35 megabytes per second sustained transfer rate. For reference, a 16x DVD burner reaches 22MB/sec.

By then, we will see Dual Layer media, just as we have for DVD media, which will double disc capacity to 50GB, and the Blu-ray specification allows for several more layers, yielding 100GB per disc or more.

So looks pretty good as far as I can see

Prices are set to start around £200 per unit at first, but most likely go sky-diving down as production scales up. Expected figures after a year or so are at around £30ish: same as DVD today.

No word on the price of the discs at the moment, but I would expect the same trend: expensive at first, then going down in price

Read all about it here

 

[Dav0s]

way too slow to be practical to me, id rather burn 5 dvd's then wait 90 minutes. looking very good for when they drop down to £30 and burn speeds go up, but the slowness was what stopped me getting a dvd-rw straight away.

not reading cd-rom is fine by me, you can have one of these ^^^ and just a normal cd-rom for very cheap or this ^^ and a dvd-rw.

or you could get this and add it to your current 2 drives if you wanted, most people seem to be using only one IDE channel these days (besides me )

wow that was a long reply, i dont know whats wrong with me, got the early morning typing bug i spose

 

[balilu]

i think theyll be fine and by the time they are released they could be faster

 

[PV5150]

Yep I'll sit back and wait for the price plunge, and the write speed increase before I commit. I can't wait for all the new technology that we have been hearing about for the last 18 months to 2 years to finally come to fruition :yumyum:

 

[bloodthirst]

im impressed by it but the prices make my mouth drop

 

[enVias]

I'm with the waiting group, too slow too pricey atm

2000th post in the Technology News section

 

[bloodthirst]

IMO its one of those thing that is massive overkill

 

[deepfried]

sony use blu-ray-

sony boss: " haha, noone will be able to copy games for the ps3 were RICH!!"

pioneer release pc based bluray drive-

sony boss:"shit"