The First Blu-ray Burner, Pioneer's BDR-101A

mikemuch writes "ExtremeTech has a review of Pioneer's BDR-101A-- the first Blu-ray burner available. The drive can do anything with CDs, is kind of slow with DVDs, and doesn't support double-density Blu-ray media, but hey, it's a start, and can burn 25GB in 42 minutes. Check out its burn speed benchmark performance at the link above."

Learn to read!

[Anonymous Coward]

> The drive can do anything with CDs

should read:
The drive can't do anything with CDs

Correction on CD disk capability

[chamilto0516]

From the article: "Interestingly, the BDR-101A neither burns nor reads CD media of any type. So if you still need CD burning or reading capability, you'll need an additional drive."

Anyway, the Blu-Ray disks are $19-29 USD. I will need to wait until I can buy a spindle of 100 Blu-Ray disks for 9.99 before I go out and buy one of these things.

Error in the article

[LionOfMacedon]

Interestingly, the BDR-101A neither burns nor reads CD media of any type. So if you still need CD burning or reading capability, you'll need an additional drive.

as usual no one has bothered to check the facts.
the drive does not burn cds at all.

The Summary

[Doomedsnowball]

In the end, the BDR-101A is really a device for a select audience. For what it's worth, the drive is actually cheaper than the first-generation DVD recorders, which weighed in at over $2,000 when they first launched. Over the next months and years, we'll see the price of Blu-ray drives start to come down, as players, media, and the technology for more easily creating discs becomes more prevalent. It's also not well-suited for watching Blu-ray movies, since no off-the-shelf software exists. It's a good tool for people who are authoring Blu-ray, and are willing to put up with the single-layer limitation. For anyone else, it's really an expensive toy.

This just about sums up the entire article: Wow, neat. Don't buy one yet.

Re:Wow

[morcheeba]

That's about the data rate of a 7X DVD burner. Or a 73X CD burner.

Stupid Sony...

[pestilence669]

This reminds me of the PS1, which used CDROM. At that time, the HP SureStore burner cost me $1,200. Good blank media cost $20 per disc. Add a little bit of soldering, and I never had to pay late fees for my game rentals ever again.

Now, right before the PS3 release, Blu-ray burners are available in the same price range. Even the media is similarly priced. If history repeats itself, which it always does, you should be able "backup" your PS3 games for under $400 in about a year.

Re:Wow

[CastrTroy]

Well, the 1x burners took 74 minutes to write a disc, which is 8.8 Megs a minute. Which is .146 Megs a second. That's pretty slow considering. Even just comparing the time to burn one entire disk, this thing blows the 1x burners out of the water.

Re:Why burn just 1?

[AJWM]

Yeah they have. DVD+R DL used to be about $10/disc ($30 for a 3-pack). Now they're in the $2-$3/disc range. Still a long way from the price of blank single layer DVD+/-R, let alone CD-R, but the price is coming down.

Hey, I remember when blank CR-Rs were in the $10-20/disc range. RAM cost $50-$100/megabyte (not gigabyte). And DVD burners were still on the horizon at $15,000 each. And we likedit. (Hell no we didn't!)

Create/burn PAR2 files with your backups

[MojoStan]

i'm too paranoid to use stuff like this for backups.. sure 25 gigs is nice but whats the use if i just burn everything in 35 copies on the disc incase one part becomes unreadable?

as media starts to hold more, i just start creating more copies of the same backup on the disc. bluray/hdvd scares me because if it gets scratched you lose so much more than if a cd gets scratched

One of the most useful comments (for me) I've ever read on Slashdot was one suggesting PAR2 files for DVD backups [slashdot.org].

For those that don't know, PAR2 files are parity files that can efficiently reconstruct missing or damaged blocks in your archive. If you have more PAR2 recovery blocks than damaged blocks, then you can completely reconstruct all of the damaged files in your archive. The best newbie explanation I've seen is the "PAR & PAR2 files" section [slyck.com] from Slyck's Guide To The Newsgroups.

If I'm backing up to a data DVD-R (capacity 4,706,074,624 bytes), I'll leave around 4GB of space for the actual data and fill the rest (to the brim) with the PAR2 files that I created for that data. I name the PAR2 files starting with the letter 'z' so that they get burned on the outer edge of the DVD. When creating the PAR2 files, I choose a block size that is a multiple of 2048 bytes because that is the block size of a DVD sector.

Some easy-to-use tools to create PAR2 files:

• Windows: QuickPar [quickpar.org.uk] (freeware)
• OS X: MacPar deLuxe [xs4all.nl] (shareware, $15)
• Linux/OS Independent (GTK): GPar2 [sourceforge.net]

Some DVD data recovery software (to get every readable block off a damaged disc):

• Windows: IsoBuster [isobuster.com] (recovery functions are free)
• Linux/OS X (command line): dd_rescue [garloff.de]

Thanks, WuphonsReach.

Re:Create/burn PAR2 files with your backups

[andreyw]

Files aren't burned in alphabetical order. They are burned in the order they were put into the ISO9660 or UDF filesystem, which is really filesystem generation utility-specific...

Interesting idea with the PAR2 files though.

Re:Wow

[Shanep]

1x CD = 150K/s (which by no coindicence is the data rate for CD audio).

Which I've always thought was odd since:

* 44,100 samples per second per channel
* 2 bytes per sample (16bit audio)
* 2 channels

44,100 (samps/sec) x 2 (bytes per samp) x 2 (channels) = 176,400 bytes per second or about 172kb/s in the old meaning of kb/s.

Re:Wow

[Aceticon]

How about this:
- Don't buy the Blu-Ray burner. Save $1000
- Use the $1000 to buy 10x 250GB external HDs. This is equivalent to 40x Blu-Ray disks

If you expect to burn more that 40 Blu-Ray disks AND expect the price per GB of Blu-Ray media to go below that for HDs (keep in mind that the price per-GB of HD media is going down fast), then go ahead and get the burner.

By the way: Reading and writting data to an from and external HD, even via USB is actually much faster than to and from a Blu-Ray disk. Still, if that's a problem buy a Firewire external HD enclosure and 10x 250GB internal HDs .. it will probably still cost you $1000.

Yes, you get more "effective" data rate from CD-DA

[default luser]

This is because the CD-ROM (Mode 1, "Data") standard added an additional ECC layer which takes up aditional bytes.

You can still use these extra bytes for extra capacity if you use Mode 2 (VCDs use this), at the cost of ECC.

In either case, the CD (assuming 1x read) still rotates at exactly the same speed, whether it is a CD-DA, CD-ROM Mode 1 or CD-ROM Mode 2 disc.