back to article Lite-on iHBS112 internal Blu-ray writer

Lite-On is certainly pushing the boundaries of optical disc burning at aggressive prices. The iHBS112 is an internal drive that goes beyond the combo by letting you read and write Blu-ray, DVD and CD media in one unit. Its Blu-ray writing speed, 12x, matches the current fastest on the market. That's not bad for £123. As a …

COMMENTS

This topic is closed for new posts.
  1. Fuzz

    Smartwrite

    "A technology called SmartWrite manages the stream of data being recorded, apparently preventing underruns even when you are using your computer for other tasks. Just the same, I recommend not running tasks that hog your resources, such as saving, printing or otherwise processing huge files"

    This technology has existed since 12x CD-RW drives first came on the market, it's been standard on every drive produced since then. Without it even 16x CD writing would be massively unreliable.

  2. Lusty

    BR

    Optical media makes a terrible backup solution as mentioned in the article, and for home movies why would I bother transfering them to an optical disk when most camcorders record to SD or HD these days? The editing is done on a computer and I can then stream to most decent TVs or get a media center.

    Not sure where BR fits in these days.

    1. Steven Jones

      Use of blu-ray

      Bluy ray still makes sense as a means of distributing content if you want to give other people copies. At the moment I use AVCHD dual-layer DVDs which is OK up to about an hour's worth of HD content at higher resolutions (often enough for home-produced content). However, AVCHD DVD support isn't universal on Blu-ray players. Now that Blu-Ray media costs are starting to come down, then it starts to be an attractive options.

      I still prefer to stick to external HDDs for backup.

  3. Sarah Davis
    FAIL

    not so fast

    all BR burners are still laughably overpriced, and BR media even more so. BR is a classic example where greed killed a product - who uses BR ?

    And this burner only does dvd's @ 16x - whats the point ?

    If this unit was £40 it would still be a little pricey but almost exceptable, but it would still be let down by BR disk prices - quality 4x disks are about £1.50 each and would to come down by at least 70% before they come close to being a viable alternative to HD's.

    Lite-On have a well deserved good rep, but this is an epic fail

  4. Paul Shirley

    test it on 3rd party software

    Whilst we need to know how broken the crapware shipped with the drive it, I'm a lot more interested in how well it works with the 3rd party software I actually use. A few tests with the 'usual suspects' - Nero, IMGBurn, K3b etc. - would be more useful to the average reg reader and their OEM version of the drive.

  5. Flocke Kroes Silver badge

    Who wants to suffer the death of a thousand media changes?

    Blue ray media: £130/TB

    Hard disk: £45/TB

  6. Anonymous Coward
    FAIL

    Backup? You kidding?

    With a single BD-R disc costing as much as a Hollywood-flick-pressed one, not gonna happen. Due to piracy concerns, blu-rays can be recorded, yes, but at prohibitive cost. The studios managed to kill the media, as far as computers go, as a whole.

    As for portable HDDs, on the other hand... I just bought an outdated and almost obsolete USB-2.0 one with a 500GB HDD (465GB actual, whatever) for the same or less price than this BD-recorder. And, oh my gosh, lo and behold, it records 9-10 times more, 5x faster. Plus I don´t have to pry my case open to shove it inside, I can plug it on USB (eg, any-freaking-where). Will my buddies own a BD player on their computers, so they can read my backup? Guess what, anything 5 years old won´t.

    For entertainment purposes, however, it has its uses. Or, if for any particular reason, your 4-year-old DVD-recorder caved in, or you can´t find a suitable replacement that will plug in your SATA-only motherboard, that drive will do.

    1. Eddie Johnson
      WTF?

      Prices Go Down

      Not sure where you're shopping but I buy BR media for less than $2.50 per disk. Remember when DVD disks were that much too? They always start expensive and fall as adoption increases. I used to use 2 CDs rather than half a DVD for price reasons, now a DVD costs the same as a CD. Soon a BDR will cost almost the same as a DVD. Sure Sony sells singles in a jewel case and hasn't lowered the $19.99 price since the beginning but that's a trap for people not paying attention.

      As for recording times I have no problem burning a full BDR in an hour and that is WITH verify. You're crazy if you don't.

  7. Pantera

    why oh why

    would you spend money on a bd diskburner a tb of br recordables (4speed not 12 speed) wil cost about 70$ and that is without taking into account the 10/15% loss as there is no way you going to get 25 gb on a disk

    external hard disks are about the same price per gb.

  8. Pete 2 Silver badge

    A more practical alternative for backups

    But what about the cost of the disks?

    A quick look around shows that 25GB disks, in bulk, are about a quid a pop. So to back up your pr0n filled 1TB drive would take about £40 of media (and if the little test the author did can be extrapolated, take 2½ days per disk to perform - say 3 months! - something's terribly wrong there, BTW).

    Compare that with the cost of buying an additional 1TB drive and the BluRay starts to look like a rather unattractive proposition. Add in the speed of copying data and the convenience of not having to swap media every few days and it becomes a no-brainer. I suspect that a 1TB hard drive would also take up less space in your "backup" drawer, too.

    Obviously, this is only one facet of a BD writer. if your main aim is to copy BD's (which you <ahem> have permission to copy <cough>) or to create disks of ALL your home movies, that's a whole different proposition. The only thing to remember then is that no-one - really: no-one except your immediate family will be the slightest bit interested in them. So PLEASE don't go showing them to your guests and visitors.

  9. Cameron Colley

    Shame the studios don't want my custom.

    I'd quite like to try Blu-ray just for fun, and at this price it could be justified as a toy but, because I won't pay Microsoft, the major studios and the US government have labelled me a criminal and so refuse to allow me to play Blu-ray movies on my PC. They were pissy about DVDs too but thankfully an evil degenerate filthy criminal named something like "DVD Jan" made it possible fro me to watch them -- though it now means I can't go to the US for fear of being prosecuted under the DMCA.

  10. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Up

    what about a BR ISO image write speed

    as regards the slow transfer building and writing of many small files ,what about making a BR ISO image somewhere on a hard drive then writing that ISO to the BR writers, what write speed and time do you see then ?

    clearly building the BR image on the fly and writing that in sections is going to be slower than making a real BR ISO as was discovered many moons ago with DVD ISO writing , it becomes second nature to make a Hard drive ISO first with DVD if your in a hurry or want to be more productive, so test that option too please (in all future reviews etc) and report back.

    still a little high priced and what of the BR bulk prices. these need to drop below £99 etc before it becomes a must have, when might that happen, looking forward to that day

  11. Eddie Johnson
    Megaphone

    You Hit the Weak Point

    I used to respect Cyberlink's DVD playback stuff but their BD software is absolute crap. There's no option to reset archive bits after burning for one thing but the absolute fail is that they sort files wrong when you do it by date. They do an alpha string sort on the date/time format that they have chosen (because they FAIL to honor regional date settings).

    The people who wrote this crap should be fired and barred from the industry.

  12. Anonymous Coward
    Pint

    Not what I'd call cheap

    For that sort of money I could get a 2TB hard disk plus a USB/eSATA docking station (and change for a pint or two). Further hard disks to use with the docking station give even more savings compared with BD media. And don't even think about the prices of 50GB rerecordable at 12x/16x.

    Wake me up when I can get a 64x drive with a spindle of 100 50GB media for that money.

    Icon - something worth spending the money on.

    1. Nexox Enigma

      Not 64x

      Random Googling suggests that 12x would require about 10,000 RPM, which is pretty high for a plastic disc. That would come out to around 400mbit, or approximately the speed you can hope to get out of a really good USB 2.0 drive (with a decent usb controller.)

      I doubt 64x / 2gbit is ever going to happen for this particular media.

      But that's ok, since we all know that optical media is pretty worthless these days. I used to only burn CDs to put in my car stereo (Sand + originals don't mix, plus if I burn mp3s on disk I get way more music,) but my new stereo has an SD slot, so I've officially got no reason for writing optical disks any more. Don't even need them for OS installs any more now that Win7 is perfectly happy w/ a 4GB USB stick (and Linux has been capable of a network install pretty much forever.)

  13. ZenCoder

    I'm done with optical ...

    Hmm options to store 2TB of data. Blue Ray burner + 80 blanks vs USB/eSATA hard drive dock and 2 2TB hard drives (one is a backup in case of hardware failure).

    If I didn't have a PC hooked up to my TV, I'd buy a Western Digital HD Live box for about $110 and then hook it up to my home network or hook it up to an hard drive.

    I am sure that this is a good format for some people, but I just don't see any merit in it for me personally, even if the discs were $.10 each and the burners $50.

  14. RIBrsiq
    WTF?

    FFS

    HDDs for backup? Really? Ever done actual backups, have you? Or are you speaking of your pr0n collection where... ehm... "quick access" trumps reliability, and loss of any specific chunk of data would certainly go unnoticed? Ever drop an HDD and then try to read data from it? I've had drives die from a 20cm drop, myself.

    While I would agree that optical discs aren't ideal for long-term backup, an application for which they certainly aren't intended, they're a good poor-man's choice for the task, I dare say. And considering the number of operational 10+ year old CDs I have (hundreds) vs. the number of operation 10+ year old HDDs I have (0), I would take optical disc backups over HDDs any day.

  15. Matt 13
    Thumb Up

    title

    not everyone is just pirating movies on BD, with HD camcorders DVD just doesnt hold enough data...

    My parents have a blueray player in the lounge, to them its just a flash dvdplayer...

    all my home video if my son is recored in AVCHD, while I could copy that to a hard drive and post it to them, talk them into copying it to a PC (which they barely know how to email from) then carry that to the front room and connect to the TV, its much eaiser to just burn a BD, pop it in the post and they play it like a normal dvd... 130 is a good price, its good to see costs slowly going down...

  16. MJI Silver badge

    I will get one sometime

    Just got a HD camera, and don't want to play back the tapes all the time. So when I have updated the editing software I want to get a BR burner.

    Yes I know I can stream from the PC to the PS3 but I'd rather have the optical media.

  17. doveman
    WTF?

    What is ideal?

    I've got most of my stuff backed up to DVD's, as I don't fancy taking the risk of losing the lot by dropping, losing, etc a hard drive. But yeah, optical discs aren't ideal, particularly if you're faced with burning 10+ in a go it soon gets rather tedious and simultaneously ties you to the PC whilst preventing you using the damn thing! Being able to access any file without swapping discs is a major advantage with HDs, although I'm not sure I'd be able to fit all my optical discs on even a 2TB HD.

    I've actually just bought a 2.5" 500GB backup HD and a USB/eSATA enclosure for it (so that I can use SATA when I've got a lot of transferring to do), but it's really only for backing up stuff that I haven't decided I want to archive yet. As I do, it will get burnt to DVD, but before I bought the HD the only option was to backup everything to DVD, which wasn't realistic for me.

This topic is closed for new posts.

Other stories you might like