True to its name, Pioneer is first to offer a Blu-ray reader/writer drive, taking advantage of the 25GB of storage per layer on a blank Blu-ray disc. Although the war for the coveted position under your living room television isn’t yet over, Blu-ray discs have a clear advantage when it comes to data storage. With 10GB more per layer than HD-DVD, they make an excellent candidate for the optical data back-up medium for the next generation.

An internal DVD writer today costs less than £30 and is capable of burning data at blistering speeds but Blu-ray technology is cutting-edge, meaning both the drives and discs are pricey. At the time of writing, single layer BD-R discs cost £9 each, rising to £12 for a rewritable BD-RE. Dual layer Blu-ray discs with a potential 50GB of storage are neither compatible with this drive nor easily available for purchase.

Like the earliest DVD writers, the speeds on offer with the BDR-101A are somewhat limited, especially when you consider the extra space that’s to be filled. Offering 2x write speed on BD-R and BD-RE discs, equating to 8.99MB/sec, burning a full disc takes approximately 44 minutes. This is even slower than writing data at 8x to DVD-R but, thankfully, the same buffer under-run technology used in DVD writers is used here, and so should keep expensive Blu-ray coasters down to an absolute minimum.

While you may use Blu-ray for general data backup, this drive fits the bill perfectly if you want to record high-definition video suitable for playback on a standalone Blu-ray player. Directly copying a Blu-ray movie is prevented by AACS encryption on the disc, a beefed-up version of the CSS content management system used on DVDs. Since the entire broadcast stream is encoded, digital playback is only possible with an HDCP compatible display adaptor and GPU. This added encryption also puts extra stress on your CPU during decoding.

While we like the idea of filling a disc with 25GB of data, jumping into writable Blu-ray is only worth doing if you specifically need the capacity. In the future, drives will no doubt be faster and cheaper than this model, while the high price of media makes sticking to DVD-Rs a better option.