Sony Optiarc America says it will start selling two new internal half-height Blu-ray rewritable drives to retailers and OEMs in the United States. Based on the SATA interface, the drives come with 8 megabytes of internal cache and are compatible with XP, Vista and Windows 7. OEMs can buy the BD-5300S; the BWU-500S will be sold at the retail level and will come with one 25GB Sony BD-R blank disc and CyberLink's Media Suite 8 Blue-ray movie editing software.

Sony says that BD-R media can be written at 12x speed, and dual-layer BD-R at up to 8x speed. At 12x speed, the drive takes less than 10 minutes to record a 25GB disc, according to the company. You know, I still remember a time when a 650MB CD-R disc took 20 minutes to burn on what was considered a rather fast drive. Will optical media ever become obsolete technology?

For more on this story:
- check out this article at Electronista
- check out this article at InformationWeek

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