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Heavy Gear May 2009 • Vol.9 Issue 5 Page(s) 18-19 in print issue |
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Battle Blu-ray We Take A Trio Of Burners For A Spin |
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When we first embarked on doing a Blu-ray drive roundup many weeks ago, we assumed there would be a fleet of options to review. Why not? The format war is over. Halfway through 2008, Parks Associates predicted that Blu-ray players would reach 5 million units for the year and grow to 40 million by 2012. Headlines sang the praises of BD movie sales over the holiday season. So imagine our surprise to learn that we could find fewer than half a dozen recent-release Blu-ray burner drives available. Many options are BD-ROM with DVD burning, but come on. If you’re going to burn to media at all, this is the age of photo-quality HD. It takes a 25GB BD-R disc to fit two hours of H.264 video at 1080p with a 25Mbps bit rate. And what about archiving? Our humble iTunes Music folder currently stands at 94.2GB. Family photos alone ring in at 22.5GB, and who knows where to even start counting all the video? One smart backup strategy entails copying this data onto some form of media and storing it outside the home. Juggling five, maybe 10, discs is manageable, but recordable DVDs would require dozens. We reviewed the internal Sony BWU-300S ($399.99) in the January 2009 issue (see page 33) and the LG GGW-H20L ($449.95) BD-RE/HD DVD in our May 2008 issue. (See page 29.) Both remain two worthy options. But where are some of the other big names? Plextor has yet to make a burner. Asus doesn’t list a BD burner. Lite On had its DH B41S and then discontinued it. Why? Sure, we know the economy is down. Yes, the Sony drive costs $399.99. But not enough demand even for small businesses to approach BD as a storage component or videographers to adopt it for their HD projects? It just doesn’t make sense! We believe there’s a Blu-ray burning market out there for PCs. Perhaps it’s not huge yet, but the growth of endless accumulation of media makes easy, high-capacity, and increasingly affordable removable media ever more needed.  How We Tested We used Intel’s DX58SO motherboard loaded with a 3.2GHz Intel Core i7 Extreme 965, 3GB of PC3-8500 memory, an Nvidia GeForce 9600 GT, and Windows Vista 32-bit with SP1 loaded onto an Intel 80GB X25-M solid-state drive. We backed our rig with PC Power & Cooling’s Turbo-Cool 860 PSU. We threw in our trusty Plextor PX-716SA, a 16X DVD burner, as a baseline reference. Knowing that people will use their burners for plenty more than just BD media, we examined performance across CD and DVD tasks, as well. We used Nero DiscSpeed test read transfer rates on a CD (BT’s album “This Binary Universe”) and a BD movie (disc 3 of the “Firefly” series). For extraction, we used iTunes to rip the BT disc and DVD Decrypter to extract the 1GB 10_2 VOB file on “Kung Fu Panda.” We used “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” for our DVD read speed tests. Finally, we built two media archives, one 4GB collection of photos, music, and videos to burn onto 8X Verbatim DVD+R discs and a 20GB collection to burn on Verbatim’s 4X BD-R media using CyberLink’s Power2Go. Addonics Zebra ZBW-H63DEU $359 Addonics www.addonics.com CPU Rating: 3.5  If you need a single Blu-ray drive to be everywhere and do everything, this is the one. Addonics has wrapped LG’s internal 6X GGW-H20LK in a sturdy aluminum shell with additional plastic protection surrounding the front and back panels. (There’s a clear faceplate that snaps across the front to further shield the bezel during travel.) The look isn’t particularly sexy, but it’s tough and lightweight—just the thing to bounce between your desktops, notebooks, and maybe a work site or two when you’re not yet ready to invest in multiple drives. The Addonics unit supports USB 2.0 and 3Gbps eSATA interfaces. (Both cables are included.) We expected to see a decent improvement when testing with the eSATA connection, but the reality is that we found any difference between the two interfaces to be negligible. Clearly, the drive and media—not the interface—are the bottleneck. Still, the Zebra turns in decent numbers, especially on CD and DVD tasks. Moreover, if you were an early HD DVD adopter, this hybrid has you covered on HD DVD reading. Read curves in Nero look smooth, with an average BD speed of 3.66X and a CD read average of 30.33X. The Addonics DVD reads peak at about 13X, whereas we saw true 16X on the internal competitors. However, note the CPU utilization on 21% during our Nero 8X CD speed test via USB—four times less than LG’s internal drive. Given that the Zebra might be used anywhere, we like the idea of having an undemanding drive, which, for the record, didn’t require any additional driver installation. Throughput could be higher and fan noise could be lower, but Addonics’ price is fair for the 6X performance, you get CyberLink’s High-Def suite disc, and there’s even a headphone jack in the back. The total package is a winner. LG Super Multi Blue BH08 $249.99 LG www.lge.com CPU Rating: 3  LG’s flagship SATA-based burner specs with 8X BD-R and 16X DVD±R reads/writes. This turned out to be optimistic, as our Nero tests showed a top BD read of about 5X. Looking at this, you might suspect the LG drive of being a slouch, but the write tests tell a more interesting story. On our DVD rip test, the BH08 delivered a totally underwhelming 23:47 (minutes:seconds), well over twice the time of our Pioneer and Plextor drives. We ran this test twice to confirm the results. Clearly, for reads and extraction, this drive may need some firmware patching (although the CD rip results were fine). But for burning, the BH08 was right in line with the pack on DVD burning and swept the field on our 20GB BD-R write, clearing Pioneer’s time by a minute and a half. There’s not a lot you can do to spruce up an internal drive, and so far no one seems to be bundling blank media to sweeten the deal. However, LG throws in CyberLink’s PowerDVD, PowerProducer, PowerBackup, Instant-Burn, and Power2Go, which also includes LightScribe support. LG’s drive is the only one in this roundup that supports LightScribe, a classy extra if you plan on doing a lot of burning and don’t like cheesy paper labels or Sharpie markers. Bottom line: We’re more concerned with write times than reads, which are fast enough even if they lag the field. LG’s charts in Nero show it to be a stable performer, the price is competitive, and a couple of extra perks make this a good fit for your main machine. Just watch out for that CPU utilization at the highest speeds. We’d like to see that number come down. Pioneer BDR-203 $279.99 Pioneer www.pioneerelectronics.com CPU Rating: 3  For BD reads, Pioneer stomps the field. This was the only drive we tested that delivered faster DVD rips than our Plextor and the only one that started BD reads at the slowest center tracks at a speed above 2X. Check the Nero charts. Addonics and LG both start slow then ramp toward a peak. Pioneer starts its BD reads at 3.35X, over 50% faster than the others in the disc zone that’s likely to be used the most often. BD reads average just under 6X, while the others eke out 3.65X and 3.66X averages. If you’re looking at doing a bunch of data transfers from disc, the BDR-203 is an obvious winner. Caveat: This was the only unit to show noticeable jitter and pitting in Nero’s CD read tests, although this is more of a theoretical than a practical concern. On writes, Pioneer trails LG a bit. Interestingly, Pioneer specs 8X on both BD-DL and BD-R; LG doesn’t list its DL write specs separately. This may be another Pioneer advantage, but we didn’t have enough DL media to do comparative testing. Also, note that Pioneer uses 4MB of cache to LG’s 2MB. Like LG, Pioneer throws in the CyberLink software suite, but there’s no LightScribe support (if you even care). Pioneer plainly designed this to be a workhorse unit aimed at low price, high performance, and not much else. In a nod to system builders, there isn’t even a Pioneer logo on the bezel. If your emphasis is on data reads, pick Pioneer. Otherwise, we’d pick LG among the internals.  by William Van Winkle
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