"Affordable at last"
With five times the storage capacity of a DVD, Blu-ray stores HD movies which you can watch on a home theatre system using a BD-ROM drive such as the Sony BDU-x10s. It also lets you access heaps of data stored on a single 25 GB BD Disc!
Features:
Sony BDU-X10S – the first internal BD ROM drive that I’ve had my hands on – has a SATA interface and a buffer size of 4 MB. In addition to blu-ray discs, the drive reads all types of CDs and DVDs. It plays commercially available Blu-ray HD movies, and playback BD-R and BD-RE media. The drive comes with a molex-to-SATA power cable, SATA cable for data transfer, driver disc, manual and a spare tray cover.
Performance:
The performance was evaluated by measuring the read speeds of single layer BD-R, DVD and CD. There’s no doubt that Blu-ray has advantages such as playback of HD content, but the read speeds aren’t any faster than DVDs and CDs. For instance, copying 21 GB of multiple files onto a 10,000 rpm hard drive took more than 45 minutes. So, if you want to copy the entire contents of a disc, you can’t take a nap for an hour, while it is copying data. Nonetheless, with BDU-X10S, you can conveniently access archived data. It can read up to 25 GB of data, which translates into a whole lot of DivX movies or thousands of MP3s. Now that 50 GB DL discs are expected anytime soon, imagine the amount of data that can be archived.
Verdict:
The BDU-X10S is a good solution for referring to huge data archives and copying them from Blu-ray media. It’s much cheaper than a BD writer, so you do not have to shell out a lot of money to simply watch HD movies on your home theatre.
For: Reads all formats, good performance, and reasonable price for viewing HD content.
Against: Reading huge amounts of data is time consuming.
With five times the storage capacity of a DVD, Blu-ray stores HD movies which you can watch on a home theatre system using a BD-ROM drive such as the Sony BDU-x10s. It also lets you access heaps of data stored on a single 25 GB BD Disc!
Features:
Sony BDU-X10S – the first internal BD ROM drive that I’ve had my hands on – has a SATA interface and a buffer size of 4 MB. In addition to blu-ray discs, the drive reads all types of CDs and DVDs. It plays commercially available Blu-ray HD movies, and playback BD-R and BD-RE media. The drive comes with a molex-to-SATA power cable, SATA cable for data transfer, driver disc, manual and a spare tray cover.
Performance:
The performance was evaluated by measuring the read speeds of single layer BD-R, DVD and CD. There’s no doubt that Blu-ray has advantages such as playback of HD content, but the read speeds aren’t any faster than DVDs and CDs. For instance, copying 21 GB of multiple files onto a 10,000 rpm hard drive took more than 45 minutes. So, if you want to copy the entire contents of a disc, you can’t take a nap for an hour, while it is copying data. Nonetheless, with BDU-X10S, you can conveniently access archived data. It can read up to 25 GB of data, which translates into a whole lot of DivX movies or thousands of MP3s. Now that 50 GB DL discs are expected anytime soon, imagine the amount of data that can be archived.
Verdict:
The BDU-X10S is a good solution for referring to huge data archives and copying them from Blu-ray media. It’s much cheaper than a BD writer, so you do not have to shell out a lot of money to simply watch HD movies on your home theatre.
For: Reads all formats, good performance, and reasonable price for viewing HD content.
Against: Reading huge amounts of data is time consuming.
