MaximumPC 2006 12

reviewsTes Ted. Reviewed. veRdic Tized

78 MAXIMUMPC december 2006

W

hen we kvetch about the price of

Blu-ray drives and media, the prod-

uct makers like to point out that the

first consumer DVD burners were $900. Put in

that context the pain might be lessened, but

really it’s like saying a root canal doesn’t hurt

as much as getting your nose broken—both

are still experiences to avoid. At least the

second-gen Blu-ray burners offer more for

the money than the first-gen models.

—Gordon Mah UnG

Plextor Px-B900a

When is a Plextor drive a Plextor drive?

Certainly not when it’s a Panasonic.

To get onboard the Blu-ray train in a

hurry, Plextor rebadged a Panasonic SW-

5582 Blu-ray drive as its own. That’s not

necessarily a bad thing. Invaluable firm-

ware updates will come from Plextor and

not some Pac Rim outfit. And to be fair,

the Panasonic’s far better than the first-

gen Pioneer Blu-ray drive we reviewed in

October, which couldn’t even read CDs.

The Plextor BX-B900A writes to CD-R

at an acceptable 24x speed.

That’s far shy of today’s top-

of-the-line 48x burners, but

that’s the trade-off with the lat-

est round of Blu-ray drives—

they burn everything, just not

that fast. The BX-B900A burns

single-layer DVDs at 8x (with

speeds dropping to 4x for

double-layer DVDs).

The BX-B900A also trumps

Pioneer’s first-gen hardware

by burning not just single-layer

Blu-ray media, but double-

layer media as well,

for up to 50GB per

disc. Again, write

speeds are weak:

It took 1:34 (hour:

min) to fill a 22.6GB

write-once disc.

We were able to

play a Blu-ray movie

using the included

WinDVD BD player,

but without an HDCP

card in our test rig,

the player downsampled the content so badly

that it looked worse than DVD resolution.

While we applaud the latest improve-

ments to Blu-ray hardware, the PX-B900A’s

price tag still stings, as does the $20 a pop it

costs for write-once Blu-ray media.

Io data Brd-UM2/U

Combining a Blu-ray drive with a USB

interface seems at first like hitching a fly-

ing saucer to a wheelbarrow. Can USB’s

meager bandwidth handle such new-

fangled technology? Even at full-tilt, 2x

Blu-ray burns hover in the 8MB/s range,

which is actually

slower than an 8x

DVD burn. So, yes, USB 2.0 provides

plenty of bandwidth.

I/O Data’s BRD-UM2/U uses the same

Panasonic drive as Plextor’s model—the

only difference seems to be the external

USB cabinet. As such, we didn’t see any

major variations in performance, except

in CPU utilization. During full-speed DVD

burns, the USB-based drive pushed CPU

utilization to 47 percent versus 31 percent,

for the Plextor.

The killer for Blu-ray adopters is that

burning rewriteable BD-RE discs is slow.

As with Plextor’s drive, it took a frakking

hour and a half to write a measly 22.6GB!

Write-once media cuts that time down to

45 minutes, thankfully, but even that’s too

long. While waiting for our burn to finish,

we pondered whether optical’s time has

finally passed. For large data sets, isn’t

it much easier to just pop in your eSATA

hard drive and copy that 22.5GB in two

minutes instead? Granted, you can’t

distribute 100GB portable drives to your

friends and family, but it’s unlikely you’ll

be giving them a $20 Blu-ray disc either,

since they won’t have the $1,000 drive

required to read them.

Singing the Blu-ray

Blues

They shoulda called it green-ray

Io data’s portable USB Blu-ray drive makes sense, as few of

your associates will have the pricey drive necessary to play

your hd discs.

the Plextor Px-B900a might be a

rebadged Panasonic, but you still get

your firmware updates from Plextor,

which is worth its weight in gold.

$1,000, http://www.plextor.com

plextor px-b900A

SoUth Park

Famed Plextor firmware

support.

northern exPoSUre^6

An hour and a half to burn

23GB?!

Io data Plextor

Our current desktop test bed is a Windows XP SP2 machine, using a dual-core 2.6GHz Athlon 64 FX-60, 2GB of Corsair DDR400 RAM on an Asus A8N32-SLI motherboard, two GeForce 7900 GTX videocards in SLI mode, a Western

Digital 4000KD hard drive, a Sound Blaster X-Fi soundcard, and a PC Power and Cooling Turbo Cool 850 PSU.

DVD Write SpeeD AVerAge 6.76x    6.78x

DVD reAD SpeeD AVerAge 6.15x     6.17x

time to burn 22.6gb to bD-re (min:Sec) 1:33  1:34

time to burn 22.6gb to bD-r (min:Sec) 43:12  42:26

AcceSS time (rAnDom/Full) 157ms /   315ms    160ms  /   318ms

cpu utilizAtion (8x) 47%     31%

benchMarkS

$900, http://www.iodata.com

io dAtA brd-um2/u

roBot chIcken

Surprisingly cheaper than

PATA drive version.

I, roBot^6

Slow burn times on all media,

and crazy expensive.