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

SuperDrive

[j00r0m4nc3r]

I would be more interested in a SuperDrive that supports both HDDVD and BR

What a Waste of Money...

[SerpentMage]

>> System administrators and database administrators can archive and retrieve large amounts of data on 1 convenient disk. Blu-ray is the next generation of storage technology and it's available today, only from Fastmac.

Really? Last I looked I can now get a terrabyte of hard disk space under 300 USD. If I want a terrabyte of RAID it will probably cost me 400 USD, maybe 500 USD. A terrabyte of blueray is 20 DVD's burning at 8x. Oh yeah I am going to pay 800 USD and 20x CD's + more time to do the same backup... Yeah that sounds like a plan!

CD's, DVD's are history for backing up purposes. Even the original intention of CD's for music is starting to become irrelevant. Times have changed.

& How Long Will the Disks Last

[BoRegardless]

I want to see some very heavy results from independent testing labs that give me an idea that if I put data on such disks that it will be readable in at least 5 years @ 99.99% reliability.

If not, hard drives are way better as they read and write at far higher speeds.

hmm

[TinBromide]

I saw the mac, had some mod points and thought that i'd revenge myself for the rabid mods who down vote me every time i poo poo macs, no matter how logic, right, obvious, or stupid i may feel at the time that i click the submit reply button.

However, if this means that i could install a *cough* open source player to play blu-ray discs on a pc that wasn't crippled by drm issues *cough vista coughcough*, it might be worth my next laptop replacement.

"Sweet?"

[Illbay]

...burning 45 GB is pretty sweet.

Okay, I can get a dual-layer DVD Burner for about seventy bucks currently, which means I can burn about 8 GB (or 18% of 45 GB) for less than one-tenth of the price--nearly twice as "cost effective."

Then you consider that I can buy the six dual-layer DVDs for about $1.50 each ($9 total), whereas a single "sweet-burnin'" dual-layer Blu-Ray disc (the kind you need to hold 45 GB) is gonna cost me at LEAST thirty bucks--four times as much for the same amount of data.

Hm. When you consider the trend, I think I can hold off for, say, two years when Blu-Ray or HD-DVD or whoever wins that war costs about what a dual-layer DVD burner costs now (and ditto for the discs).

Burning 45 GB onto just one disc will be "sweet," but for the nonce I can stand burning six d-l DVDs without laying out the $800 smackers (esp. since I've already bought the DVD burner with my latest notebook computer anyway).

Depends on Requirements

[bill_mcgonigle]

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

If you get a good enclosure they're closer to $40, then you need at least two of them for RAID, you need controllers to drive them - if that's USB you're stuck at slow rates, if it's e.SATA you have expensive controllers and/or port limitations. Now you need to handle hot-swapping effectively for hard drives which takes some admin experience or an expensive hard drive shelf.

I use hard drives for my business's backups, but the cheapest I can do today is $1.38 per GB if I want two copies off-site (I don't trust a single old HD spindle to work next year), with hot-swap and e.SATA. I'm not even counting the cost of the computer which needs to have enough PCI slots to handle the e.SATA cards, and that's with el-cheapo cards, not 3Ware or anything dense, plus I have to admin the linux RAID-10 setup.

Now, what I get for my trouble is versioning for 6 months (rsnapshot) and instant random-access to my backups, so in my judgement it's worth it. But storing old .DV archives on this system wouldn't be cost effective - I'd much rather store them on BluRay.

Gosh, maybe I don't have to chose between the two options!