BluRay reader/burner on low spec hardware

[Trapper]

*sigh*

 

My father in law wants an external BluRay burner. What for? No idea. He is an ex-teacher (along with his wife, so my home life is just wonderful!) so will not listen to reason!

 

He either wants to run it from from his ASUS Windows tablet. This has USB 3.0, but only has an Atom CPU. He'd never be able to render any movies/films and I assume the burn time would be long.

 

Or he could run it from his old laptop. ~4/5 years old. Core2Duo, but only has USB 2.0. So the CPU can handle it, but burning a 25/50GB BluRay at USB 2.0 speeds would be painful.

 

Has anyone seen a review from a trusted website/magazine listing minimum specs for burning BRs? He won't listen to me, but as it's a birthday present it'll be my money buying it, and my tech support spending weeks trying to perform a miracle.

[XiJ]

I would have thought USB speeds faster than the optical writing process anyway so won't matter much. I'd use the laptop it'll use memory / HDD to cache / create image first anyway

[XiJ]

Just read that you'll get write speeds of up to 8x on usb 2.0. For faster speeds you'd need usb 3.

[Arthur]

According to the Blu-ray specs, the minimum speed a disc can be burnt at is 4.5 MB/s (1x = 36 Mb/s). USB 2.0 is capable of around 35 MB/s (280 Mb/s) so this would mean the maximum the drive could burn data at on your Core 2 Duo PC is either 6x or 8x.

 

 

The more layers a Blu-ray disc has the slower the write speed, so if you bought a drive like the Samsung SE-506BB it will take anywhere between 16 to 64 minutes to burn a disc depending upon which ones you use.

 

[b]BD-R[/b]
Single Layer: 6x
Dual Layer: 6x
Triple Layer: 4x
Quad Layer: 4x

 

There probably isn't any point buying a larger external drive such as the LG BE14NS40 if you are going to connect it to a USB 2.0 port since it will never be able to go beyond 8x (although you would be able to burn triple and quad layer discs at 6x instead of 4x).

Edited October 5, 2014 by Arthur

[Arthur]

He either wants to run it from from his ASUS Windows tablet. This has USB 3.0, but only has an Atom CPU.

Which processor does his tablet have? An Atom Z3740 is around the same speed as an old E or T-Series Core 2 Duo.

 

www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_lookup.php?cpu=Intel+Atom+Z3740+%40+1.33GHz&id=2059