Drive Specifications

Let us take a look at the detailed specifications of the Sony BDU-X10S BD-ROM Drive:

What’s inside the box?

The drive we received was a retail package that comes with all you need for an easy and quick installation.  The retail package includes the following:

• Sony BDU-X10S BD-DVD Drive

• CyberLink Power DVD HD Edition

• Quick installation guide

• Tray Cover replacement kit

• Serial ATA Cable

• 4 pin to 15 pin Serial ATA power adaptor

• Mounting screws

• Product information and Quick start guide

• Software Disc

• Blu-ray Movie Trailer/Clip disc (Vol. 6)

Retail Package Contents

Moving right along, let’s take a closer look at the Package Details.

Box Front

Box Rear

Box Left

Box Right

Now let’s take a closer look at the drive itself:

Drive Front

Drive Rear

Drive Bottom

Drive Top

Drive Sticker

Test machine

For this review we are testing the Sony BDU-X10S mounted inside of our Nvidia based system with the following components:

Review PC #1:

• Motherboard: eVGA / Jetway 939GT4-SLI

• Processor: AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 165 @ 2.7GHz

• Memory: 2x 1Gb G.Skill Extreme Series 2GBZX @ 250MHz

• Video: ATI X600

• Display: Samsung SyncMaster 710N 17” LCD

• Sound: Onboard AC97

• Hard disks: 320GB Seagate SATA-II

• Operating System: Windows Vista Ultimate x86 is installed on this machine.

Review PC #2:

• Motherboard: Asus P5K Deluxe WI-FI/AP

• Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 Conroe @3.70 GHz

• Memory: 4x 2GB A-DATA PC2-6400 DDR2

• Video: eVGA  8800GT Superclocked

• Display: Hanns·G HG-216DPO 21.6" 5ms Widescreen HDMI LCD

• Sound: SoundMAX Digital HD Audio (Onboard)

• Hard Disks: 2x 320GB – 1x 750GB Seagate SATA-II

• Operating System: Windows Vista Ultimate x64 is installed on this machine.

System set-up:

The drive identifies itself as: Sony BDU-X10S and is installed as a SATA device, with firmware 1.0a factory installed.

As you can see by the burst rate of 48 MB/s and the Nero Info Tool readout the drive is running in UDMA 4 mode.

Software

Windows Vista Ultimate x86 is installed on our test system; we will also be using the following software for this review:

• Nero CD-DVD Speed

• Nero InfoTool

• EAC (Exact Audio Copy)

Included Software with the Drive

The Sony BDU-X10S is shipped with CyberLink Power DVD 7.3.

An Introduction to Blu-Ray Disc:

Until recently, optical disc technologies such as DVD, DVD±R, DVD±RW, and DVD-RAM relied on a red laser to read and write data. The new technology Blu-Ray format uses a blue-violet laser, which explains the name Blu-ray.

Blu-ray drives can also be made backwards compatible with CDs and DVDs through the use of a BD/DVD/CD compatible optical pickup unit.

A blue-violet laser (405nm) has a shorter wavelength than a red laser (650nm); this makes it possible to focus the laser with even greater accuracy. This will allow data to be packed more tightly, so it’s possible to squeeze more data on the disc even though it’s the same size as a CD/DVD. This together with the change of numerical aperture to 0.85 enables Blu-ray discs to hold 25GB/50GB.

Blu-ray media is structurally different from DVD media. The Blu-ray disc consists of a single 1.1 mm thick polycarbonate substrate with a 0.1 mm thick cover layer on the bottom side of the disc, while the DVD disc is made of two 0.6 mm thick substrates. In both cases, two substrates are bonded together by a UV-cured resin adhesive:

DVD vs. Blu-ray disc structure

The larger 25 GB and 50 GB storage capacity of the Blu-ray disc is due to the higher density of pits and tracks on the disc. Unlike previous optical discs, Blu-ray uses a shorter-wavelength, tighter-focused violet laser to read and write pits that are about three times smaller than pits used in DVDs:

CD, DVD and Blu-ray laser beam colour and size

CD, DVD and Blu-ray pits and tracks as seen by a scanning electron microscope

Blu-ray disc surface mapped by an atomic force microscope

Comparison of Blu-ray Disc, HD DVD and DVD formats:

We include a table of both high-definition formats and including DVD format for comparison.

On the next page we will take a look at the drives Reading Performance…