Computex 2006: 300W GPUs, Conroe, HDMI Video Cards and Lots of Motherboards

BenQ: Status of Blu-ray and SATA Optical Drives

We talked at great length with BenQ about the current lack of Serial ATA optical drives.  While SATA optical drives don’t offer any real performance advantage over PATA drives, there are other factors that are driving our demand for and interest in the units.  Intel’s new I/O Controller Hub used in the 965 (Broadwater) chipsets, ICH8, doesn’t natively support any PATA ports; motherboard manufacturers have to resort to a 3rd party controller to offer one PATA port.  It’s clear that Intel wants to be rid of PATA, and with 6 - 8 SATA ports on new motherboards these days the time to transition entirely to SATA is now. 

Unfortunately, as BenQ tells us, the same desire to transition to SATA doesn’t exist with the Tier 1 OEMs that are building systems using these optical drives.  Apparently there are still a number of compatibility issues with the default Windows driver and many SATA optical drives, which has made the big OEMs wary of moving away from tried and true PATA drives.  With very little OEM pressure to transition to SATA optical drives, manufacturers like BenQ have no reason to push for a quicker move to SATA. 

BenQ said to expect less than 5% of its drive shipments by the end of this year to be SATA; by the middle of next year that number will thankfully grow to 25%.

With DVD readers and recorders quickly dropping to commodity price levels, the new focus of optical drive makers is on Blu-ray and HD-DVD.  BenQ is exclusively producing Blu-ray drives and its representatives showed us the first two Blu-ray drives that will debut later this year.  The BW1000 is offered in both an internal and an external variety, both featuring a 2X read/write speed for Blu-ray media.  Dual layer Blu-ray media will be written to at 1X. 

The drives also feature a LED indicator telling you what sort of media you’ve got in the drive (e.g. Blu-ray or DVD).  The internal drive will carry a price tag of around $700 when it debuts in July.  The Optical Pickup Unit in a Blu-ray drive can cost around 20x that of the OPU in a DVD drive, which contributes to the incredibly high cost. 

BenQ stated that you may be able to upgrade these 2X drives to 4X drives with a firmware update later on, but it’s too early to tell for sure.  The first native 4X Blu-ray drives from BenQ will arrive in Q1 of next year.