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Mid January 2010: state of the Blu-Ray drives?

Loa

Loa

macrumors 68000
Original poster
May 5, 2003
1,733
79
Québec
Hello,

Looking into blu-ray drives as BD disc are now decently priced, but prices for the BD burners seem to be all over the place.

A few questions:

Are there burners that Mac users need to stay away from?

Can we use eSATA through the basic Sil3132 PCI-e eSATA cards?

Do we need to look for Mac compatible burners, or are all burners the same?

What are the "top" burners (price/features), right now?

Thanks!

Loa
 
You can use eSATA, but I'd recommend against it as eSATA, as of right now, anyway, can be a little flaky. Most drives won't saturate USB 2, let alone firewire, so I wouldn't worry much about it. You don't need to look for mac compatible burners (most will work, a few may have issues but google is your friend here); the most cost effective way to use one is to get an internal burner and mount it in your optical drive bay.

I run an LG-GGW H20L via SATA on my 2008 Mac Pro (routed to ODD ports on logic board). LG has since deployed better, cheaper models that you could get, and they seem to offer the best value-for-money.

I don't know which drives should be avoided at this point, as like most people, I've only purchased the one.

Hope that helps.
 
SATA = SATA, so there's nothing special about a unit that will work in a MP. :) Unless you're trying to use IDE with SATA, which can be done via an adapter. ;)

As per the SIL3132 eSATA cards, I'm confused. You already have it working, according to this post. It can be a bit flakey as you know (finding drivers that will work, as there appears to be differences between some cards).
 
im probably going to pick up an lg 8x bluray burner .. and prolly replace my current superdrive with it .. mayb eill keep both but i would like to keep that one bay open to mount ssds
 
Thx for the quick replies.

I'm still hesitating between placing the burner in the optical bay, or have a 6th drive in there, with an external burner. Yet the idea of an external back-up that I can grab in case of an emergency seems safer.

As for the sil card, it is working just fine for external HDs, but I remember reading that it wouldn't work for burners. Don't know why and I wanted to be sure.

Right now I just found a cheap BH08LS20 (170$ US, free shipping), and I think that's the drive I'm gonna get.

One last question: none of the drives I've seen can burn BD+R (as opposed to BD-R). Any reason why?

Loa
 
It can't burn BD+R...because there's no such thing. DVD+R was a pointless, unnecessary addition to the DVD spec that was ultimately made a moot point by hybrid DVD drives (solved by hardware manufacturers). DVD+R added nothing we needed. This time around, the two standards focused on something more streamlined, but of course a lot of people got screwed over with HD-DVD.

I can't believe people were interested in going to the trouble of upgrading their optical media for a mere 15 GB per layer. Just didn't make a lot of sense.

Your Blu-ray standards are, as of now: BD-R, BD-RE, BD-R DL (50 GB), and BD-RE DL.

There are projects underway to add more layers and increase the size of existing layers (in fact, already they've figured out how to increase layers to 33.4 GB with existing drives and media by using newer error checking code). But all of that will be firmware upgradable and I seriously doubt you'll need more than 50 GB on a single disc anytime soon.

Though some more prolific filmmakers and Hideo Kojima might...
 
Steve says that he doesn't believe in Blu-ray. I suppose he wants people to buy HD stuff off the iTunes Store. As for professional macs, the mac pro, I think that a blu-ray burner would be a great option as standard.
 
TheStrudel said:
DVD+R added nothing we needed.
Click to expand...

FWIW, DVD+R is technically superior to DVD-R. The tracking system is more accurate and is less susceptible to buffer underruns. They're both probably the same when used with top-shelf (ie Taiyo Yuden) media, thuogh.
 
That may be true, but I never knew a single person who had a problem with it. I certainly didn't.

It wasn't worth the trouble of adding another format and the resulting format confusion when those difficulties could be (and were) addressed in hardware and software.
 
i was thinking of just adding an LG bluray burner .. i think it is 8x .. i was planning on getting it from macsales
 
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