2006: the year of High Definition video, Blu-ray and HD DVD. Well, that's the way things are looking at the moment, with just about every consumer electronics manufacturer in the world jumping on the bandwagon. These technologies aren't exclusively reserved for the consumer-electronics market - they're coming to the PC as well, and Samsung is the first manufacturer with a PC Blu-ray drive ready to go...
I was rather disappointed to find an IDE interface around the back of the drive, especially as Samsung has recently launched a SATA DVD writer. Considering that the next generation of South Bridge chip from Intel will drop IDE support all together, this seems like a bad move by Samsung. However, most current PCs still have at least one IDE connector, so unless it's another six months before the drive is out, this shouldn't prove to be a major problem.
The tests I could perform were limited due to the fact that I only had access to a just one BD-RE (RE for rewriteable) disc and no BD-R media. Samsung said media prices will initially be around £15 for a 25GB BD-RE disc, so we're back to the early days of expensive DVD media. The SH-B022 supports 2x writing speed, around 9MBps which equates to about 7x in DVD writing speeds. Considering that you have the ability to write 25GB to a single-layer disc, this isn't that fast and as you'll see from the tests.
The single 12.7GB file took 25m 31s to write, so it'll take roughly twice that to fill up the whole disc. Doing the same test, but with the separate files - 4,486 of them - took slightly longer, 26m 29s. So we're back to the having to wait an hour or so to burn a full disc.
Samsung hasn't even set a price on the drive, although I was told it was likely to end up in the $800-900 category - ouch. It's claimed that HD DVD will be cheaper, but for now we'll just have to bide our time and wait until retail products hit the shelves. It's also worth taking into account that dual-layer media will be available later this year with 50GB of storage capacity, so unless you have the cash to spare and you don't mind being an early adopter, you might just want to wait until then.
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I was rather disappointed to find an IDE interface around the back of the drive, especially as Samsung has recently launched a SATA DVD writer. Considering that the next generation of South Bridge chip from Intel will drop IDE support all together, this seems like a bad move by Samsung. However, most current PCs still have at least one IDE connector, so unless it's another six months before the drive is out, this shouldn't prove to be a major problem.
The tests I could perform were limited due to the fact that I only had access to a just one BD-RE (RE for rewriteable) disc and no BD-R media. Samsung said media prices will initially be around £15 for a 25GB BD-RE disc, so we're back to the early days of expensive DVD media. The SH-B022 supports 2x writing speed, around 9MBps which equates to about 7x in DVD writing speeds. Considering that you have the ability to write 25GB to a single-layer disc, this isn't that fast and as you'll see from the tests.
The single 12.7GB file took 25m 31s to write, so it'll take roughly twice that to fill up the whole disc. Doing the same test, but with the separate files - 4,486 of them - took slightly longer, 26m 29s. So we're back to the having to wait an hour or so to burn a full disc.
Samsung hasn't even set a price on the drive, although I was told it was likely to end up in the $800-900 category - ouch. It's claimed that HD DVD will be cheaper, but for now we'll just have to bide our time and wait until retail products hit the shelves. It's also worth taking into account that dual-layer media will be available later this year with 50GB of storage capacity, so unless you have the cash to spare and you don't mind being an early adopter, you might just want to wait until then.
For the complete preview Click Here
