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(More customer reviews)Ok. I own more than 11 bd-r burners connected to the same computer. Sata all of them. I have lite on 12x, lg 8x, lg 10x and this pioneer drive. I get this drive only for having maximum media compatibility, some units will not recognize certain brands of bd-r media. since i live in Venezuela and here you have to buy the media that is at the moment available on the market the is not plenty of brands to choose from.
I coneccted the drive to my super tower generic crappy case and started testing. The drive is a bit longer than LG Electronics 10X Blu-ray SATA Writer Drive with Software WH10LS30K - Bulk (Black), but a lot smaller than LG Electronics 8X Blu-ray SATA Writer Drive WH08LS20 (Black). So it can be used on small sized minitowers with reduced space inside.
My objective is to use the 11 burners in the tower to burn simultaneously 11 different iso images. For feeding this data hungy units i have two Sans Digital TowerRAID TR8M-B 8 Bay SATA to eSATA Port Multiplier JBOD/RAID 0, 1, 1+0, 5 Enclosure (Black) with 16 Hitachi Deskstar 3.5-Inch 2TB 7200RPM SATA II 32MB Cache Internal Hard Drive 0S02861inside of them. One rack have a raid 5 array using 8 disks 2 tb each (About 14 tb usable space), and the other one is using 8 individual 2tb disks in jobd raid mode.
This unit give me a huge surprise because simply Outperforms all my other drives by 2.5 times. using the same media in all my drives the lg ones and the lite on one can reach a maximum of 4x burning speed (on 4x labeled bd-r media). This pioneer beast burns at 10x speed on 4x media disks. I dont know how the drive do this, but certainly do it, and works!!! If you need productivity and speed is important to you, buy this drive now! Im using imgburn software and the drive firmware havent been updated (what i should even try to update the firmware with such performance?)! (latest img burn version, but old ones works fine as well)
I burn currently around 500 bd-r disks PER WEEK. And this is a bulletproof unit!
For reaching such high burning speeds you MUST use a dedicated hard drive to store the iso image to be burned on each bd-r drive. Forget about on the fly copy from another bd-r drive if you want to burn at speeds higher than 4x. Or you will loose a lot of blank media.
Past week i ordered two more of this drives to replace two of my 8x lg burners, they still works great but the pioneer performance exceded all my expectations by far! i will sell the lg ones.
In order to connect 11 burners to the computer you MUST buy 4 port pci-X controllers. Go with the cheap ones non raid or software raid based, like Syba, Ultra, and other brands. Forget hardware based RAID controllers with 6,8,12,16 or 24 ports since they DO NOT recognize optical atapi drives, only hard drives. I buy a 800$ 24 Channel Raid Controller only to find out this :-( . at leats i use this beast now for the raid arrays now.
Forget conecting more than 2 blu ray burners to your mother board and use them simultaneusly, the cheap board controllers apparently have some type of bottleneck in the bus and the drives will not achieve even 4x each. I own a msi k9a2 platinum board (by the way, i know its old).
Also forget to use pci (non pci-x) sata controllers. The bus wouldnt allow you to use more than 3 drives simultaneusly at 4x each (or two at 6x, or one at 12x). If you try with 4 units the burning speed will drop to 0.8x in each unit, i suppose this is caused by some tipe of collapse, bottleneck or overflow in the controller. I tried 3 different brands of pci controllers. The issue is the bus, PCI doesnt allow such transfer rates, go with pci-x.
This drive worths every penny you paid for it. i will buy this unit from now on even the price be twice the other units.
I havent tried 3D 50 gb DL bd-r media on it yet. But this week i will test this feature.
Pd: sorry for my english, i know is not the best but obviously is not my main lang.
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Pioneer Internal Blu-ray Disc/DVD/CD Writer BDR-206 (Black)
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