Lite-On Goes Blu-ray For Capacity And Performance

Nov. 27, 2007

The LH-2B1S (Fig. 1) Blue-ray drive is Lite-On’s second generation of Blue-ray drives. It looks to lower the cost of entry while providing the 2x performance and 25Gbyte capacity needed for the latest hi-def movies and backup requirements.

William G. Wong

The LH-2B1S (Fig. 1) is Lite-On's second-generation Blue-ray drive. It's a result of the company's initiative to lower the cost of entry while providing the 2x performance and 25Gbyte capacity needed for the latest high-definition movies and backup requirements. It uses a SATA interface instead of the IDE interfaces found on older optical drives. The LH-2B1S drive can handle Blue-ray BD-R and BD-RW disks at 2x speeds. It can also read and write DVD and CD media as well. The former DVD-R and DVD+R works at 12x speeds while the latter runs as 32x speeds. Of course, these are relative to the respective media types. The drive can handle hi-def video, although it must be paired with a matching video card (most media of this type are encrypted, requiring end-to-end security). Likewise, hi-def video requires plenty of compute horsepower, so a 2GHz processor is usually the minimum. Hardware accelerated video helps as well. Installation of the drive is trivial since it uses SATA instead of IDE. No more jumpers or large cables. The drive has proven to be durable, and has handled all the media I could throw at it. Of course, the Blue-ray media tends to be a bit more expensive. Related Links Lite-On

About the Author

William G. Wong | Senior Content Director - Electronic Design and Microwaves & RF

I am Editor of Electronic Design focusing on embedded, software, and systems. As Senior Content Director, I also manage Microwaves & RF and I work with a great team of editors to provide engineers, programmers, developers and technical managers with interesting and useful articles and videos on a regular basis. Check out our free newsletters to see the latest content.

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I earned a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a Masters in Computer Science from Rutgers University. I still do a bit of programming using everything from C and C++ to Rust and Ada/SPARK. I do a bit of PHP programming for Drupal websites. I have posted a few Drupal modules.

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