Blu-ray is mainly used for movies and storing PlayStation 3 games, and the price of BD media is still way too high for most people. If there is anything except the prices that is holding back the spread of Blu-ray burning it’s the limited write speeds. Over the last few months we have seen a couple of drives with 8x write speed, which speeds up the processor a bit. Buffalo is about to raise the bar further with the first 10x Blu-ray burner.
The company has two models coming, one internal SATA model (BR-H1016FBS-BK) and one external eSATA equivalent (BR-H1016SU2). With 10x speed for BD-R SL media the USB format isn’t enough since the burners need stable speeds up to 45MB/s, which at the same time means it will take up to 10 minutes to fill 25GB.
Other than that the burners write BD-R DL media at 8x speed, DVD-R/+R at 16x speed and CD-R discs at 48x speed.
The burners are made by LG and will launch in Japan in September costing around $300 (internal) and $360 (external).
