You rate it 60% because you don't think anyone will use it, not because there's something wrong with it, isn't that unfair?

That would be like rating a game 60% even though you love it, but who's going to play 'Ground breaking and flashy game 3' ?

A rethink may be in order here.

And no, I'm not interested in Blu-ray in the slightest.

Suppose you want to do a long term archieve off site.

Suppose that its not just 25GB or 50GB but 100GB of data that you want to archive?

A portable Blu-ray player makes sense for a lot of the points you already mention.

Suppose you're a law firm and you're required to deliver your evidence to the other party? Instead of having box loads of paper, you may have GBs of PDFs online? So how do you transport a copy to your adversary? If you use a memory key, its possible and probable the something gets lost and misplaced. With a read only blu-ray drive, you don't have to worry that someone accidentally deletes a file from the key fob(s) containing the PDFs.

Its a cool idea and does have some practical uses.

Hey - how about archiving ? - sure you can backup to tape or disk; but when you want a long term archive - surely the dual layer blue ray is good for that? (Costs need to come down though).

Sort of agree with you Squits, but they have to compare it to other technologies - the price doesn't stack up when you can get 64GB+ usb devices for less.

However the thing came out in Q3 2008, a bit slow off the mark aren't we? And the "I don't want to spend 7 quid on a disc to test it" - how hard is the recession biting at Reg Towers?? :-)

The thing works, and you admit it's fast as hell. Why the low review?

And you reviewed a Blu-ray burner without burning any BDs??

I'm just waiting to see the media fall under US$5 for archive purposes.

For video purposes I won't buy Bluray movies until there is a ripper available so I can cut and edit scenes. Because yes, that is my constitutional right, even within copyright law.

The same thought did occur to me. I don't want to see personal bias being involved in hardware reviews which I trust so much.

Not exactly. Well sort of.

I rated the LG at 60% as I feel that Blu-ray is an ineffective and expensive way of shifting HD movies from one place to another. Solid state memory or a hard drive are quicker, cheaper and easier.

How can you rate it based on an assumption that there is no market. There is a market, however niche it is, it is still a market.

"We didn't test the external drive with BD-R media as we don’t have any to hand and the £7-per-25GB-disc cost put us off the idea of buying a pack. BD-RE media is, at £12 per disc, far better value as it's reusable, but both types of Blu-ray media are only available with a burning speed of 2x while the GGW-H20L is capable of BD-R 6x and BD-RE 2x."

What a load of bollocks. So you review a BD writer but do not actually evaluate its task at burning BD discs because you are too cheap to buy the media. Do not subject this horrible review to your readers then!

Definitely not up to your usual good standard here. I can't see how the final score should include "Reviewer's bias because it's a good device but he has no use for it". Solid state storage is better for shuttling files around (regardless of content) but not for archiving, or god forbid using in a blu-ray player.

That's not just a ridiculous degree of bias, it's a ridiculous type of bias to creep into a final rating anyway.

I had considered distribution of data to clients, customers, friends and family and struggled to think of many cases where DVD didn't fit the bill. In those instances when you want to send 25GB, 50Gb or more I wonder how many people would have the necessary Blu-ray ROM drive to read the discs. Blu-ray is primarily for movies and doesn't really work with data, in my opinion.

I think I'll hang on and stick with DVDs for now. As much as I'd love to get a Blu-Ray burner I can't warrant spending £150 or so on a drive and £7 per disc at the moment (okay, technically my first CD-RW drive cost £150 with CD-R media at £1 a disc, and my first DVD-RAM was also £150, didn't do + media and again media was about 75p a pop) but I'm going to hang on until the prices come down to something more like under £80 for the writer and under £2 a disc.

I can certainly see the point of archiving though especially if the media prices come down a bit.

Can't help but think though the score should have been a bit higher, maybe more 75/80%?

Rob

This was one stupid thing to do in the review

You have asked yourself a question and you didn't answer it.

Where is a single test of BluRay disc to confirm USB Speed supported (6x)?

Finish it.

I bought an external DVD burner many years ago as I had a good CD-R burner and I didn't want to mess with taking my existing DVD drive out. Now that I have a netbook, I am quite glad for having the external burner, which I can now connect to my netbook and use it to install media.

I didn't buy any 2x BD-R media for the external LG as it is exactly the same drive as the internal LG that I previously reviewed. The only reason to run any burning tests was to check whether the USB 2.0 interface had any impact on performance and the 2x BD-RE burn test categorically shows this is not the case so burning to 2x BD-R wouldn't have helped us in any way.

I have to agree with the author here. For capacities much in excess of a single BD, hard drives win every time. I can buy a 1TB drive for under £80 at dabs, so optical discs are just hopelessly uncompetitive for backups or archiving. (Anyway, how does the shelf-life of optical discs compare with magnetic ones these days. Which will be more readable in 30 years?) At the opposite end, for items much smaller than a single BD, DVDs or USB sticks are more widely supported options if you want to pass stuff around. So the total market for high capacity optical discs is very narrow and getting narrower with each passing month. (Optical is just *so* 20th century.)

Very few people need a BD burner. Most simply need storage. This is a rubbish storage product.

Using a memory stick/card/drive or a hard disk drive to simply MOVE data is one thing, and clearly more cost effective than a BluRay disc.

But I don't think anyone would buy a HDD or even a memory stick in order simply to give a copy of some data to someone else, especially if the data was required to be read-only (or at the very least is NOT required to be updatable "in situ" on the media.

If nothing else, the cost effectiveness argument starts to fall apart in some situations.

A 250GB HDD may be a cheaper way of handing out 250GB of data, but it's an expensive way of handing out 80GB.

And as for video/movies being the only application, I seem to remember that the same thing was said of DVD "back in the day" (not necessarily by this site). The one thing that is clear from the history of data storage technology is that applications soon grow to fill the capacity of *any* available storage tech.

This device should have been reviewed on the basis of it's execution of the technology, not the reviewers opinion of whether the technology would be of use to anyone.

That's for those other people to decide, based on what they need from the technology - the reviewers job is to help such people decide which execution of the technology is the better investment for them.

I bought the LG GGC-H20L myself, which gives you much better bang for your buck. Yes, it's the internal model and doesn't write to Blu-Ray discs, but with Blu-Ray movies to be found for 8-10 pounds, who is going to bother trying to copying onto blank media that costs the same as or more than the original?

Ironically, I've not even bought a single Blu-ray movie yet because their average price is still too high for my tastes (particularly for new releases) and I'm still glutted on the dozens of HD-DVDs I bought at 3 quid a pop last year online :-) A shame Cyberlink annoyingly dropped HD-DVD support from their software from version 8 onwards thought- quite premature I thought since you can still buy HD-DVD-capable drives like this one and HD-DVD movies from several major online sites.

"This is the reason why your reviewer is so out of touch with the speed of the latest DVD rewriteable media - he simply gives Blu-ray a wide berth and sticks to AVI or DivX movie files on a device that isn’t laden to the gunnels with DRM."

In other words Leo Waldock does not like this, because he prefers to download his movies from bittorrent for free, and Blu-Ray is evil...

Seriously, is there anyone left at El-Reg with ANY credability?