Buffalo has put out a fast new external Blu-ray burner that connects to PCs via a USB 3.0 interface. Rated at 12x speed, the BR-X1216U3 (page translated) is listed to be able to fill up a 25GB disc in 11 minutes, while also being able to write to single layer and dual layer DVD discs. All good and well, but there’s a few niggles: the fastest speeds can be had if your PC has a 5Gbps USB 3.0 port. Of course, it’s backwards-compatible to regular USB 2.0, but it limits the burning speeds to 7x. Also, it’s set to ship in Japan (for the equivalent of $450) by the end of the year, with no word on an international release.
Hong Kong-based AMEX Digital has recently announced a Mac mini Blue-ray Drive Upgrade Kit for adding Blu-ray to Apple’s newest Mac mini (obviously). Capable of 4x BD read speeds and up to 8x speed DVD burning, the slot-loading drive comes with a SATA interface, the Blu-ray upgrade kit should work with Roxio’s Toast 9, Adobe’s Premiere Pro CS3 or VLC player for handling BD and DVD movies on a Mac (which is recommended since you can’t play BD movies on a MAc just yet). The BD upgrade kit is available in the US for $199.
Other World Computing has announced the release of the Mercury Pro BDR-205 External, an external BD/DVD/CD-burner that comes with four different connection types: USB 2.0, FireWire 400, FireWire 800, and eSATA. Listed to burn onto Blu-ray discs at up to 12x, DVDs at 16x, and CDs at up to 40x speeds, the Mercury Pro also supports burning onto dual-layer BD-R discs for recording up to 50GBs of data. It’s available now for $350, with a package that includes the necessary cables and a pair of recordable 25GB single-layer BD-R discs.
Pioneer has just announced that they’ve come up with what’s currently the world’s fastest Blu-ray disc burner, the 12x BDR-205. It’s an internal drive that connects via the SATA interface, and takes a step up the evolutionary tech ladder by going past the previous 8x cap for BD burners. It features Pioneer’s Low Vibration Mechanism Design for noise and vibration reduction, and can also burn onto recordable DVDs at 16x and CDs at 40x speeds. The 12x recording speeds is supported on both 25GB BD-R and 50GB BD-R DL discs.
It’ll sell for $249 when it comes out early next year.
Pioneer has just announced a new ultra-slim external DVD burner that plugs in via a USB port and burns single layer DVDs at 8x speed and dual-layer discs at 6x. Calling the DVR-XD09 “ultra-slim” is pretty accurate, since the entire drive is hardly larger than a regular CD jewel case. Weighing half a pound, the drive is also capable of burning dual-layer RW discs and CD-RW discs at a 24x clip.
Asus’ new drive is a very slim external BD burner that stands vertically to save on space, and draws power from the USB connection to spare users from having to plug in an extra power cable.
Asus has taken the DVD drive, trimmed it down, given it a fresh coat of paint, and named it the External Slim SDRW-08D1S-U. The slim box has a vertical, stand-up form factor, which can save you a bit of desktop real estate. Available in black or white, this very glossy model doesn’t need a power adapter so you don’t have to deal with a bulky cable either.
LaCie just announced the very fast d2 Blu-ray drive that burns discs up to 8x speed. This release actually doubles the speed of the company’s previous Blu-ray drive model. It can fit around 50GB of data (or 4 hours of high definition video) on a single Blu-ray disc – that’s 10 times as much data as you can burn on a DVD. It also burns at the same speed on both single and dual-layer discs.
LaCie has rolled out its Hard Disk MAX high capacity storage system, which comes with a whopping 2TB storage capacity and RAID features. The sleek black box by industrial designer Neil Poulton contains 2 large-capacity drives that can be configured to either RAID 0 (for high capacity) or RAID 1 (for high security). RAID 0 will stripe data across both of the disks for fast data retrieval, while RAID 1 will mirror data exactly on both disks to assure data reliability. A switch at the back of the box lets you do that in a jiffy, while a blue LED strip under it will flash red to warn you of problems. (more…)
Pioneer has just announced a new ultra-slim external 
Asus’ new drive is a very slim external BD burner that stands vertically to save on space, and draws power from the USB connection to spare users from having to plug in an extra power cable.
