Pioneer BDR-101A Blu-ray Disc Writer

Nero CD Speed v4.51 - BD-ROM:

To test the BDR-101A's BD-ROM reading performance, I used the Blu-ray Disc version of The Fifth Element. This single layer disc is about 23GB in size.

	Transfer Speed			Seek Times			CPU Usage
	Average	Start	End	Random	1/3	Full	1x	2x	4x	8x
Pioneer BDR-101A	2.00x	1.99x	2.00x	56ms	174ms	385ms	0%	1%	2%	3%

Pioneer's new drive has a maximum speed of 2x when reading BD-ROM discs. By looking at the screenshot you can see that the drive starts reading at about 2x and stays there until the end.Not very speedy, but that's about as fast as you get when reading BD media. I should point out that CD Speed's CPU usage test does not seem to work correctly. The drive cannot read BD media at 8x, let alone 4x, so I'm not sure how its generating those results.

Unfortunately, we were not able to play back the movie as our test computer does not have an HDCP compliant video card. Each time we tried to play it with WinDVD BD, it returned a message stating that "Your display environment does not support protected content playback." Keep this in mind if you plan on playing AACS protected titles with the BDR-101A or other PC-based Blu-ray Disc drives.

Nero CD Speed v4.51 - BD-R and BD-RE:

Next we'll look at the drive's BD-R and BD-RE reading performance. For this I created a few data discs using single layer BD-R and BD-RE media from Memorex and then ran our BD read tests with CD Speed.

Memorex BD-R

	Transfer Speed			Seek Times			CPU Usage
	Average	Start	End	Random	1/3	Full	1x	2x	4x	8x
Pioneer BDR-101A	2.00x	1.99x	2.00x	71ms	200ms	349ms	0%	1%	2%	3%

Memorex BD-RE

The BDR-101A had no problems reading Memorex's BD-R and BD-RE media. In both cases, the drive started reading at 2x and stayed at that speed throughout the entire session.