Fortunately, optical drive manufacturers are now pushing the envelope with smoking-fast 12x burners.Įxternal drives offer the convenience of connecting to everything from notebooks to servers, without the installation hassle enthusiasts often deplore.

Rapidly declining hard drive costs are a big problem for the struggling BD-R archiving market, yet today’s media prices finally allow single-layer discs to catch up.Īnd yet, none of that would matter if we were still stuck writing at 4x speeds. And yet, while USB thumb drives are the 21 st century's floppy disk, that whole measure of price per gigabyte gets prohibitive when it comes to distributing lots of storage to lots of friends, coworkers, or family members.Īside from physical distribution advantages, optical media remains a mid-term alternative to big hard drives and tape for backing up data. Indeed, slow and expensive writing forced most enthusiasts to give up the idea of optical media altogether and make the switch to fast flash-based drives with what seem like an endless supply of rewrite cycles. At one-eighth the media price and up to three times the speed, it’s high time to reconsider our options. The performance of the external Blu-ray drives we're testing today might be equally surprising to anyone already accustomed to 4x burners. The price you'll pay per disc is as low as $1.25 right now.

There's a pleasant surprise in store for anyone who hasn't paid much attention to Blu-ray media for a while (probably a result of being turned off by it in the past). We tested a few of today’s fastest drives with USB and eSATA connectivity to find out where this technology stands. The advent of affordable, high-capacity media could bring a renaissance in optical storage, but only if the performance is adequate.

Esata external blu ray burner