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Panasonic To Ship Form Factor-Standard Blu-ray Drive

Posted by Zonk on from the nice-when-the-parts-actually-fit dept.

Lucas123 writes "Panasonic plans to unveil the thinnest Blu-ray Disc drive made yet at the upcoming CES show. The drive is 9.5mm high, which allows it to fit into standard laptop form factors instead of requiring manufacturers to redesign systems to fit high-def DVD players as they've been doing. 'Panasonic has already begun offering samples of the drives to laptop makers with the hope that the companies will build it into new PCs.'"

5 of 94 comments (clear)

  1. Re:...what? by Necreia · · Score: 5, Informative

    Currently the Blu-Ray drives are of a slightly different size, requiring companies (like Dell) to have non-standard sized disc drive slots that they are placed into-- meaning that only 'tailored' laptop forms can support internal Blu-Ray currently. This would make it so any current laptop mold could come with Blu-Ray.

  2. Re:Speed by mcpkaaos · · Score: 4, Informative
    From blu-ray.com:

    How fast can you read/write data on a Blu-ray disc?

    According to the Blu-ray Disc specification, 1x speed is defined as 36Mbps. However, as BD-ROM movies will require a 54Mbps data transfer rate the minimum speed we're expecting to see is 2x (72Mbps). Blu-ray also has the potential for much higher speeds, as a result of the larger numerical aperture (NA) adopted by Blu-ray Disc. The large NA value effectively means that Blu-ray will require less recording power and lower disc rotation speed than DVD and HD-DVD to achieve the same data transfer rate. While the media itself limited the recording speed in the past, the only limiting factor for Blu-ray is the capacity of the hardware. If we assume a maximum disc rotation speed of 10,000 RPM, then 12x at the outer diameter should be possible (about 400Mbps). This is why the Blu-ray Disc Association (BDA) already has plans to raise the speed to 8x (288Mbps) or more in the future.
    --
    It goes from God, to Jerry, to me.
  3. Re:Too late for MWSF by Amouth · · Score: 4, Informative

    actualy the X isthe same for CD's as Compaft Flash cards 1x = 150KB/s = 153,600B/s = 1,228,800b/s = 0.146MB/s

    honestly it doesn't bother me that they did that.. although i do agree that DVD/Blu-Ray/HD-DVD should have stuck to the same damn unit of measurement... but they kinda did ..

    see the orginal 1x. ment you chould burn a full cd in 1 hour .. 2x ment 30min.. and if i am correct that is what they are doing for DVD/Blu-Ray/HD-DVD.. soo to figure out the rate

    (diskSize/((60*60)/(xRating)))'s

    note that that is only for disk media and not how flash memory is done.. flash is still 1x = 150KB's

    --
    '...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
  4. Re:The low volume of posts show... by Borland · · Score: 4, Informative

    Or it could be that the announcement of a "form factor" isn't the most exciting and debatable topic. All you really need is one post, bubbling to the top, explaining that it means the drive can go into standard laptops. Someone already did that bit, so what's left?

    Arguing the merits of 7mm vs 9mm sizes? Yeah that's a real hot button issue.

  5. Re:Too late for MWSF by Guspaz · · Score: 4, Informative

    No, 1x was meant to mean the same speed that the audio played at; one-times real-time. 2x would mean you burn/read at twice the rate of playback. 1x never meant you could burn a CD in one hour. For example, a standard CD-R is 72 minutes, and takes.... 72 minutes to burn at 1x. Most CDs are 80 minutes these days. I'm sure you can figure out how long they take to burn at 1x.

    1x happens to be 150KB/s, but that wasn't the original definition.