I have been waiting forever for Apple to introduce Blu-Ray support in the Mac and for manufacturers to make an ATAPI internal BD drive I could just stick in my old G5 Powermac.

The second is still unlikely to happen but interestingly, the first sort of already did. Some enterprising souls did try to connect BD drives to Macs and were surprised to find the Mac OS happy to read and write data to Blu-Ray. What Apple are unhappy about is the blu-ray movies security format, the fact that it must be followed all the way to the screen and its strong licensing rules and costs. Data on the other end is perfectly OK, so they just did it without telling anybody. It’s fine with me as all I really wanted was a secure, large capacity random access backup system.

Learning of that, I did my homework and found the perfect external drive: the inexpensive and massively capable LG Super Multi Blue. For a bit more than £200, you get a rather well designed external drive that will read anything the market has made that’s round and shiny and write to everything except HD-DVD. Since this last format has been abandoned and you’re unlikely to find blank HD-DVD disks nowadays, you’re not missing much. More important to me and not yet mainstream, the drive will write to double sided BD, giving me the option to put 50GB of data on a single BD disk. Nice. Writing 50GB at 4x, whatever the original throughput of BD was, is going to take hours anyway so speed is actually too slow to be a huge factor either way.

While I like as little clutter as possible around my computer, I settled for an external drive as I thought it could be swapped between computers, used from a portable and resold if it didn’t work (and I could have it now!). It has already been quite useful in helping me install things on my drive-less Eee PC 901 (which recognised it automatically) and I am sure it will have a long and fruitful life as one of my essential computer peripherals.

LG BE06LU10 Data according to LG:

http://www.lge.com/products/model/detail/be06lu10.jhtml

Write Speed

BD-R (SL/DL) 2x, 4x CLV, 6x CAV / 2x, 4x CLV

BD-R (SL LTH) 2x CLV

BD-RE (SL/DL) 2x CLV

DVD-R 1x, 2x, 4x CLV, 8x ZCLV, 8x, 12x, 16x PCAV

DVD-R DL 2x, 4x CLV

DVD-RW (SL/DL) 1x, 2x, 4x, 6x CLV / Not support

DVD-RAM 2x, 3x ZCLV, 5x PCAV

DVD+R 2.4x, 4x CLV, 8x ZCLV, 8x, 12x, 16x PCAV

DVD+R DL 2.4x, 4x CLV

DVD+RW (SL/DL) 2.4x, 4x, 6x CLV, 8x ZCLV / Not support

CD-R 4x, 8x, 16x CLV, 24x, 32x, 40x PCAV

CD-RW 4x, 10x, 16x CLV, 24x ZCLV

Read Speed

BD-ROM (SL/DL) 6x / 4.8x CAV

BD-R (SL/DL) 6x / 4.8x CAV

BD-R (SL LTH) 3.8x CAV

BD-RE (SL/DL) 2x / 2x CLV

BDMV (AACS Compliant Disc) 4.8x CAV

HD DVD-ROM (SL/DL) 3x / 3x CAV

HD DVD-R (SL/DL) 3x / 3x CAV

HD DVD-Video (AACS Compliant Disc) 3x CAV

DVD-ROM (SL/DL) 16x / 8x CAV

DVD-R (SL/DL) 12x / 8x CAV

DVD-RW (SL/DL) 10x CAV / Not support

DVD+R (SL/DL) 12x / 8x CAV

DVD+RW (SL/DL) 10x CAV / Not support

DVD-RAM 2x, 3x ZCLV, 3x-5x PCAV

DVD-Video (CSS Compliant Disc) (SL/DL) 8x CAV

CD-R/RW/ROM 40x CAV

CD-DA (DAE) 40x CAV

8cm CD 10x CAV

Video CD 40x CAV

Data Transfer Rate

BD-ROM 215.79 Mbits/s (6x) max.

HD DVD-ROM 109.65 Mbits/s (3x) max.

DVD-ROM 22.16 Mbytes/s (16x) max.

CD-ROM 6,000 Kbytes/s (40x) max.

Access Time

BD-ROM 180 ms typ

HD DVD-ROM 210 ms typ

DVD-ROM 160 ms typ

DVD-RAM 180 ms typ

CD-ROM 150 ms typ.

Buffer Size

4 MB

Interface Type

USB 2.0 Interface (480Mbits/s)

Dimension

(W x H x D) 163 x 50 x 260 mm