While pretty much everyone knows that Blu-ray is the high-definition successor to DVD, the actual technical specifications for this new optical technology get a little more complicated.

The 'blu' in Blu-ray refers to the blue wavelength of light emitted from the laser used to read the Blu-ray discs. The shorter-wavelength light (405nm to be specific) means more information can be packed into a the same space because a finer stream of light is reading the data.

By comparison, red lasers operate around 650nm, so less data can be stored in the same space.

Put another way, the capacity of Blu-Ray media is far greater than what you'd get with DVD - up to 50GB of storage on a single disc, nearly six times more information than a dual-layer 8.5GB DVD.

The other benefit to Blu-Ray is that the greater density of Blu-ray media means faster reading and writing speeds. The default read rate for Blu-ray media is 4.5 megabytes per second (also referred to as 1x speed), so the 5x ROM speed of the ASUS BC-1205PT being reviewed today is equivalent to 22.5 megabytes per second of bandwidth!

To convert all of that into actual video playback numbers, a regular Blu-ray disc has enough bandwidth to play back 1920 x 1080 resolution at 24 frames per second in progressive (rather than interlaced) mode, which is more commonly known as the 1080p video standard. Standard 50GB dual-layer Blu-ray media can have this information encoded in a variety of formats, with the most efficient codecs capable of around four hours of video playback at 1080p resolution.

Future Blu-ray media will expand beyond the 50GB storage limit by allowing multiple layers of data to be added on to a single media disc, in much the same way that dual-layer DVD media is created today. These multi-layer discs should be backwards compatible with any Blu-ray player, and recently introduced prototype 16-layer discs are capable of storing over 400GB of data!

Prelude to Benchmarks

The details of how the ASUS BC-1205PT Blu-Ray dual layer SATA DVD burner was configured for benchmarking, including the specific hardware, software drivers, operating system and benchmark versions are indicated below. The general specs for the reference platforms are the same. Please take a moment to look over PCSTATS test system configurations before moving on to the individual benchmark results.

PCSTATS Test System Specs:

processor: intel Core 2 Duo E6750 Clock Speed: 8 x 333 MHz = 2.66 GHz Motherboards: MSI X48 Platinum Videocard: MSI NX8800GTS-T2D320E Memory: 2x 1024MB Corsair Twin2X2048-6400C4 Hard Drive: 74GB Western Digital Raptor WD740 CDROM: ASUS BC-PT1205-BD Heatsink: Intel Reference Cooler PowerSupply: PC Power & Cooling TurboCool 510 SLI Software Setup Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate Intel INF 9.0.0.1003 nVIDIA Forceware 169.25 Workstation Benchmarks SiSoft Sandra 2008 Nero CD Speed

SiSoft Sandra 2008

Source: Sandra

Sandra is designed to test the theoretical power of a complete system as well as the individual components. The results are also purely theoretical and may not represent real world performance.

	Sisoft Sandra 2008 Benchmark Results
Optical Drive	ASUS BC-1205PT
Disc Type	BD-DVD
Rated Drive Speed:	3.9x
Drive Index	13.47 MB/s
Random Access:	154ms
1/3 Stroke Access:	197ms
Full Stroke Access:	325ms
Access Time:	154ms

SiSoft Sandra 2008 pegs the ASUS BC-1205PT as being a little bit slower than its specified speed, which is typical for optical drives which list their theoretical maximum read speeds instead of their averages. 13.47MB/s is still around 10MB/s faster than most DVD-ROMs can read data.