Hands on: Blu-ray storage

We recently tested a Blu-ray drive for high-definition movie playback on a PC. Like HD-DVD, you’ll need a compatible software player and pretty quick hardware to decode the high-definition video files without dropping frames.

If you’re using a DVI connection for your display, you’ll also need both a graphics card and monitor that support HDCP.

While both Blu-ray and HD-DVD are delivering high-definition pre-recorded content today, Blu-ray has the advantage of drives that can also record data; most HD-DVD drives are currently read-only. This is clearly of interest to PC owners, as Blu-ray could be used to backup and transport a large amount of data on a convenient 5in optical disc.

Single-layer write-once (BD-R) and rewritable (BD-RE) discs boast unformatted capacities of 25GB – over five times more than a single-layer DVD, or around 35 times that of a CD. Dual-layer 50GB write-once blanks are also available.

Test configuration
To test the data recording facilities of Blu-ray, we fitted a Sony BWU-100A internal drive to a Core 2 Duo E6700 system. This Sony model, like most Blu-ray drives so far, is an IDE device, requiring an old-style, wide parallel ATA connector on your motherboard. As time goes on, we expect to see the Serial ATA interface adopted on more optical drives.

Most modern writing software applications are already equipped for Blu-ray. We used Nero Premium Reloaded version 7.7.5.1 running under Windows Vista Ultimate, and the program recognised the drive’s recording capabilities straightaway.

The Sony BWU-100A was one of the first Blu-ray drives, so it only offers 2x recording speeds. Newer models, such as LG’s GBW-H10N, offer 4x speeds with BD-R discs.

The considerably higher data density of Blu-ray means 2x should correspond to a speed of 8,990 Kbytes/sec. To test this, we burned a BD-RE disc with 40 separate ISO CD images, each of around 650MB. This resulted in 22,951MB of data, which was just under the maximum formatted capacity of the disc.

Nero initially predicted just under three quarters of an hour to complete the task, but readjusted its estimate as time went on, with the last bits eventually written as the clock approached 90 minutes. This worked out closer to half the claimed 2x data rate, which Nero had clearly been using to make its initial estimate. Like all storage devices, the data rate can vary greatly depending on the size and number of files you’re writing.

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