Review: Sony Blu-ray Drive Burns All Discs
Sony's first-generation Blu-ray computer drive, the BWU-100A, is compatible with more disc formats than any other optical drive now on the market. The BWU-100A can burn single- and double-layer Blu-ray discs, single- and double-layer DVD discs, and CD-R and CD-RW discs.
The only other Blu-ray recorder on the market, Pioneer's BDR-101A (see review), isn't compatible with double-layer Blu-ray media, nor is it compatible with plain old CD-R and CD-RW discs. But the penalty that the Sony BWU-100A pays for universal compatibility seems to be that it records on Blu-ray media much slower than the Pioneer drive does.
As a refresher, DVD discs can hold 4.7 Gbytes per layer, and each disc can have two layers per side. But that's still not enough for high-definition video. Blu-ray discs can hold up to 25 Gbytes per layer, and single- and double-layer Blu-ray discs are already available. Developed by Sony, Blu-ray supports the 1,920 x 1080 resolution of high-definition video, while DVDs support a horizontal resolution of 480 lines maximum. Blu-ray disc formats include BD for pre-recorded movies, BD-R recordable and BD-RE rewriteable.
The Sony BWU-100A, an internal drive for PCs, costs about $750, which is $250 less than the Pioneer drive. Relatively expensive, both drives are aimed at professional users more than consumers. But anyone interested in testing, authoring and distributing high-definition Blu-ray content will want to get their hands on one. A Blu-ray drive also lets users play any of the new Blu-ray movie titles on a computer, but you need a high-definition graphics card and display to really appreciate the content.
The Sony BWU-100A is an internal 5.25-inch drive that interfaces as an ATAPI device. It comes with three pieces of Blu-ray media: one BD-R recordable, one BD-RE rewriteable and one BD-R Double Layer disc that holds up to 50 Gbytes. It also comes bundled with Cyberlink Power2Go software, which supports recording on BD-R and BD-RE media, as well as DVD and CD media.
The BWU-100A can read and write Blu-ray media at 2x speed. It can also read and write DVD media at speeds between 4x and 8x, and read and write CD media at speeds between 4x and 24x. Note that data on Blu-ray media is packed more tightly than on DVD media, so the BWU-100A's Blu-ray speed rating of 2x has nothing to do with its DVD speed ratings. DVD drives run at a 1x speed of 10.8 Mbps, or 1.35 MBps. But Blu-ray drives run at a 1x speed of 36 Mbps, or 4.5 MBps. So the 2x BWU-100A offers a maximum data transfer rate of 72 Mbps or 9 MBps.
CRN Test Center engineers tested the BWU-100A in a state-of-the-art system containing a 2.93 GHz Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800 processor with 1 Gbyte of Kingston memory installed on an Intel D975XBX motherboard. The system also contained a 750-Gbyte Seagate Barracuda hard drive. Test Center engineers first tried the drive using CD-R media. One file, 359.3 Mbytes in size, was burned to a CD-R disc in 3 minutes 13 seconds. That equals a speed of 1.86 MBps, which equates to 12.4x for CD media. This was only about half as fast as the drive's maximum rated record speed of 24x for CD-R media.
Next engineers burned 4,502.8 Mbytes (about 4.37 Gbytes, contained in two folders and 107 files) to a DVD-R disc, which the BWU-100A is rated to record on at 8x, or 10.8 MBps. The Cyberlink Power2Go software reported the record speed from start to finish at 8x, and the job took a total of 9 minutes 19 seconds to complete. The drive therefore averaged a DVD-R record speed of 8.05 MBps, which is less than 8x, but faster than the Pioneer BDR-101A, which burned the same data set to the same type of media at 7.08 MBps.
Next, engineers burned the same set of files to a BD-RE disc, which the Cyberlink Power2Go software recognized as having a total capacity of 23.6 Gbytes. The drive did the complete burn at 2x and finished in 19 minutes 22 seconds. The drive therefore averaged a BD-RE record speed of 3.9 MBps, which is much slower than its rating of 9 MBps.
Thinking that 4.37 Gbytes wasn't enough data to accurately gauge speed across an entire disc, engineers next burned 535 files in 10 folders totaling 21.8 Gbytes to a BD-RE disc. This took 1 hour and 36 minutes to complete, which made for a transfer rate of 3.8 MBps, still nowhere near 9 MBps. Thinking that the Sony drive might prefer write-once BD-R discs, engineers burned the same 21.8 Gbytes to a BD-R disc. This time the drive completed the burn in 43 minutes 58 seconds, which is a throughput of 8.26 MBps and almost as fast as the drive's 2x rating of 9 MBps.
So the BWU-100A doesn't seem to like re-recordable Blu-ray media as much as it does the write-once media. Regardless, the Sony BWU-100A is compatible with more types of media than any other optical drive on the market, and it costs less than Pioneer's Blu-ray drive. That makes the Sony drive the one to have -- for at least a few months. The competing format to Blu-ray, called HD DVD, is currently available in a few play-only units, but no PC recorders are available at this time.