The first commercially available Blu-ray disc drive for PCs from Pioneer Electronics is now available, supported by Roxio BD software from Sonic Solutions and blank media by TDK, approximately half a year after formal introduction.

The release makes possible for the first time the backup of up to 25GB of data on a single layer BD-R (recordable) or BD-RE (rewritable) disc, as well as image-to-disc recording and the archive and playback of hours of high-definition video content.

Initially targeted to professional users, the Pioneer BDR-101A will allow authoring facilities to perform testing and evaluation of commercial Blu-ray Disc releases in preparation for replication. Roxio digital media software for Blu-ray Disc will also enable image-to-disc recording, saving of BD disc images, and data transfer for file backup on BD.

The Pioneer BRD-101A drive can playback, read, record and re-write DVDs (recordable discs at 8x and rewritable discs at 4x) as well as playback, read and record single-layer 25GB Blu-Ray discs (at up to 2x), but cannot read or write conventional CD and DVD-RAM discs as well as HD DVDs.

It is noteworthy that the BRD-101A is designed for Parallel ATA, which has been gradually replaced by Serial ATA on the market. The device was already certified by numerous technical inspectors, such as TÜV already in July 2005. Approximate price of the part is around $1000.

Story filed 24.05.06