Yeah only $749.90, that means $250 cheaper than other BD burners. A bargain, right?!

Sony BWU-100A

The drive looks like Panasonic SW-5822 (Matshita BD-MLT) but the Sony has 8MB buffer memory while Panasonic only 2MB.

太贵了，买不起啊

omfg only 750 bucks, i'm gonna buy 5 of them, and use them as door stop

Still waiting for SATA drive

that's another thing that bugs the hell out of me...so many computers are coming with only SATA connectors and hard drives are slowly but surely making the SATA switch, but optical drives show no sign of switching to SATA any time soon (or at least not very quickly)

granted, I still have all PATA stuff so it doesn't bother me much, but it seems weird to me.

"The biggest problem with today's SATA host controllers is that SATA gets errors that never happened on PATA. And today's SATA host controllers do a very poor job of reporting these errors to the host software. Then there is the problem of having an OS device driver for SATA that understands these errors and knows how to recover from the error conditions. As of September 2003, T13 is just now starting to talk about these problems.

There are some SATA host controllers that are not ICHx compatible and these require proprietary BIOS or OS drivers. We can only hope that the Intel AHCI specification effort is successful in bringing us a new and better SATA host controller standard." SATA Article

New Intel Broadwater Chipset with ICH8 only supports SATA controllers. NO PATA and only some motherboard manufactures add a side IDE chip for PATA support, but only up to 2 drives. I am hoping NVIDIA chipset will support PATA because I need at least 4 PATA controllers, 3 burners and 1 reader and thinking of upgrading to the conroe from AMD Opteron 170

My days of first dopter are over
got burned (no pun) on buying dvd burners early
paid > $300 then fell to under $50 within a year

do not buy anything with sony on it

Tell me how it all goes

Like HD plasma TV's, these things are still several years away from being reasonably priced.

YEP !!!! I fully agree with you ! It’s best to keep well away from anything with Sony on it!!!

So I guess Lite-on drives and Benq drives aren't worth buying? I'll buy Sony as long as they're rebadging quality products to sport their name, and not charging a high price to do so. But I do understand what you are saying.

Same here. I still have my first CD recorder tucked away
in the bottom of a closet. I don't have the heart to throw
it away. It burned at 1x and I paid $2500 for it. And to add
insult to injury, it died after one year, just out of warranty,
and Ricoh refused to service it.

I'll wait until these Blu-ray drives hit $100. Let some other
suckers be the guinea pigs this time.

If forced to bet one way or the other, I'd say the plasma technology as it currently exists won't survive.

You could always buy a PCI expansion card for extra PATA support, some also have 2 SATA ports so you can't go wrong.