I-O Data Blu-ray 3D-Ready External and Internal Drives Unveiled

With all the attention that the 3D display mode has been getting, and with all the films being shot or converted into it, PCs were quite fast to adopt support for it, and I-O Data has just made its latest contribution in the shape of two ODDs.

Since 3D films in high quality take up a lot of virtual space, it fell to the Blu-ray disk to store all titles so far recorded in this format.

This led to the need of the specification that defined support for Blu-ray 3D, after which actual devices were launched with this capability.

In addition to and Blu-ray players and other media players with support for such disks, a number of optical disk drives for PCs were developed.

I-O Data has just offered its two latest such products, going by the names of BRD-3DS12 and BRD-3DU8.

The former is an internal writer, meaning that it has nothing unusually noteworthy as far as design goes, while the latter is an external drive with a more or less silver-colored enclosure.

The BRD-3DU8 communicates with host PCs via the USB 2.0 connection, so it has to make do with a maximum writing speed of 8x for BD-R writing.

The BRD-3DS12 has no such limitation, so it can push that type of media to 12x, while BD-RW are written at 2x.

The drive also supports scribing of CDs and DVDs in various formats, with speeds of up to 16x for certain DVD types and 48x for some of the former sort.

Finally, as a last similarity between the two so-called siblings, I-O Data implemented a cache memory of 4 MB on each.

Both newcomer should be up and shipping by the end of the ongoing month, November 2010, at prices of $343 for the BRD-3DS12 and $356 for the BRD-3DU8.