Digital Home Thoughts: Toms Hardware Reviews Low-cost 'Combo' Blu-ray Drives

"Once again, we face a situation where having separate drives might make sense to some people because the fastest DVD writers have slightly higher burn speeds than available combo drives. But the practical matter of saving a few seconds on a burn is only really valuable for someone who uses the feature continuously. Rather than devote resources to improving DVD-writing speed, combo-drive manufacturers have focused recent improvements on Blu-ray reads, which, at the now-standard 8x speed, are fast enough to buffer several seconds of video for each second of play time. The added read speed is gratis thanks to competition between manufacturers, so we finally have a selection of combo drives with good enough performance to convince us to take the plunge."

How many of us with CD/DVD writers haven't bought a Blu-ray drive for our PC's due to cost, not wanting a second drive just to watch Blu-ray, or simply because we perhaps have an HTPC case which only has space for one drive? If you are in the market for a drive that allows you to watch Blu-ray and DVD movies, yet still be able to burn CD/DVD discs, then this review by Toms Hardware of three low-cost 'combo' drives might just help you decide that these combo drives are now a viable and relatively inexpensive option for taking the plunge to Blu-ray.