Blu-Ray Drive For Apple Notebooks

Sean Jackson writes "Fastmac has beaten Apple to the Blu-Ray punch and has a new slimline Blu-Ray drive that works in PowerBooks, iBooks, Mac Minis, the MacBook Pro 17", and a few other systems. It's pricey ($800), but you have to admit that burning 45 GB is pretty sweet. Here are technical specs. Fastmac says that playing Blu-Ray movies isn't currently supported since there is no software player. However, several solutions are in the works and there is always a chance OS X 10.5 will support playing movies. Perhaps this means that Apple isn't far behind and will be offering Blu-Ray with the next MacBook and MacBook Pro revisions."

Comments

Re:Meh

[jimstapleton]

To put facts with your point:

Cheapest Blu-Ray burner: $529 + 1 25GB DVD (requires a decently powerful video card???)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8 2E16827106037

Cheapest per-GB BD Disks: $32.99 (150GB total ~$0.22/GB)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8 2E16817131063

Blue ray in it's /best/ light financially...

HDs in better light
HDDs:
750GB: $254.99 ($0.33/GB, 15 BD's worth of data)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8 2E16822148134
500GB: $129.99 (26/GB, 10 BD's worth of data)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8 2E16822136073

OK, ignoring the cost of the BD drive, which we'll assume you only need to buy once, per-GB the BD is cheaper. However, assuming you don't use unlimited BDs, then you you are cost effective with BDs, only if you have to have simultaneous backup of up to X GB:
529 + .22x = .26x -> 529 = .04x -> 13,225 = x

So, you must need at least 13TB of backup at any given time for BD to be more effective in terms of cost. (NOTE: if you do a rolling backup, you'll never reach this, and unless the BDs are -RW, they'll probably not be cost-effective)

And I'm petty sure 10 optical disks are about the same size standard HD or larger. With a good/small enclosure, you'll still have less space than 15BDs, and you only need one enclusre, just swap the drives. Heck you can get a dongle type setup that doesn't even require the enclosure.

So, HDs have space /and/ cost advantages in several (but not all) situations).