Is It Worth It To Buy A Blu-Ray Burner?

The Blu-ray rewriteable optical media format as of this month has been around for 5 years. July 18, 2011 will mark rewriteable Blu-ray’s 5th birthday. Sony introduced the first consumer-available rewritable Blu-ray drive on July 18, 2006 for the low-low price (yes, that’s sarcastic) of only $699. What a deal.

Blu-ray burner drives have officially broken the $100 price point – but just barely. This one by LG is $98.98 after shipping, so you know where to put your two cents (ha ha ha).

BD-R discs at their cheapest are about 6 bucks a disc, as in the kind that hold 25GB of data. You do not enjoy any savings by using BD-Rs as the cost is 24 cents per GB. DVDs and hard drives are way, way cheaper. What you pay for with BD-R is convenience. Presently, there is nothing you can buy right now for 6 bucks that will fit in a sleeve that holds 25GB of data other than a BD-R disc. Anything else that holds that kind of data is well over 6 dollars.

How long does it take to burn a full 25GB in a single session?

Currently, the max write speed for BD-R is 12x concerning affordable drives you can buy right now.

The first thing to bear in mind is that BD-R has a much higher data rate than CD or DVD. What this means is that 4x on DVD is absolutely not the same on BD-R, as the BD will be much, much faster.

Were you to burn slowly at 1x on BD-R, a full 25GB burning session would take roughly 45 minutes. 4x takes around 30 minutes – and bear in mind 4x is the most common BD-R disc sold. 6x discs, which are the ones you should buy, can have a full 25GB completed in as little as 15 minutes.

I absolutely cannot guarantee you will achieve a fast 15-minute 25GB burn even if all conditions were ideal and correct because it depends what you’re burning, how many files are involved, and so on – but at least you have an idea of what to expect.

The general rule of thumb is that fewer files will burn faster. For example, if you have five 5GB video files, those probably will burn at the full 6x rate and the disc will be finalized in 15 minutes. On the other hand, if you have a mix of small-to-big files and vice versa, the burn will take a lot longer because the drive has to ‘negotiate’ more.

In addition, brand of media counts just like it does with CD and DVD. If unsure which brand to go with, Verbatim is always a good choice. Yes, you will pay more for them, but it’s worth it. Ask anyone that uses Verbatim media.

Is BD-R worth it?

That’s still a tough call at this point. It all boils down to the question of whether you believe 25 gigs on a single disc is convenient even though it costs more than DVDs and hard drives.

You know what DVDs cost, so I don’t have to mention that; you know they’re cheap.

Right now a 5400 RPM 3TB (yes, 3) HDD is $140 – and that’s with SATA 6.0Gb/s connectivity. That’s just under a nickel per GB, cost-wise.

Like I said, it’s a tough call to say whether or not Blu-ray burning is worth it.