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."

Dell already offers them...

[MSFanBoi2]

Dell offers BluRay in their XPS and has done so for quite a while...

How long?

[hansamurai]

How long would it take to burn a 45GB disc? Blu-ray.com says 1x is 36Mbs, so that would be 4.5MB/s. 45GB is approximately 45000MB, so it would take about 10,000 seconds at max speed the whole way. So that's like what, 2 hours and 50 minutes? Not that bad for massive backup if you just start it when you go to bed.

Re:Wow..

[jimstapleton]

It's available for the PC too...

But nobody cares (can't say I blame them, I sure don't).

Apple playing catch-up again...

[DogDude]

http://configure.us.dell.com/dellstore/config.aspx ?c=us&cs=19&l=en&oc=DYCWRSV&s=dhs [dell.com] Yawn.

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 [newegg.com]

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

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 [newegg.com]
500GB: $129.99 (26/GB, 10 BD's worth of data)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8 2E16822136073 [newegg.com]

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).

FUD

[Kjella]

1) ICT (Image Constraint Token) will make the movie play at half resolution
2) Hollywood has agreed to not use ICT before 2012 at earliest if at all
3) ICT is per disc, so none of your current discs will be degraded in the future

Running around like chicken little saying the sky is falling, will have none if not the opposite effect. All you'll do is make normal people try it, see that you're wrong and think you're some sort of wierdo conspiracy crackpot. HDCP won't affect many, most won't notice it and for the technically savvy there'll probably be workarounds. That is if it's even relevant anymore since if AACS is broken.

* Note: AACS can't technically be broken as such, but if broad classes of devices are compromised to the point where the public backclash would be too great to revoke the key, it's de facto broken permanently.

Re:& How Long Will the Disks Last

[LoudMusic]

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.

Hard drives will ALWAYS be more reliable than any flat piece of plastic. But you can't throw a hard drive in an envelope and mail it for $0.41 in the US like you can a CD / DVD / HD|BR-DVD. Families enjoy this because they can send home movies around the nation very easily, and business find it useful for mailing out data that would otherwise take a long time to send over their already busy internet connection.

But for all my archival needs I use big ass external hard drives.