BD-R XL support is relatively rare, you will need to read the specs of the drive and expect to pay more for a drive that supports writing them.ĭon't worry about region-free for DVD. If you burn two sets of BD-R XL discs, one with data and one with 100% PAR2 recovery data, I find that's a very effective way to store most people's entire family photos in a physical volume that will easily fit in a smaller sized bank vault on a medium that is universally readable and durable enough for long term climate controlled storage. I find these discs fantastic for burning archival discs of things like family photos that you put in the bank vault. BD-R XL standard is 100 GB, but there's a new expansion with UHD that supports up to 125 GB. Which is kind of a shame, because there is still built in driver support for DVD-RAM in Windows.įor archiving, you want something that supports M-Disc (for discs that can withstand disc rot for up to 1000 years) and something that supports BD-R XL, which is the highest capacity burnable discs.

The one exception is DVD-RAM which most modern drives don't support, and none of the ones that support it will support DVD-RAM type 2. Anything modern will burn DVD and all its variants, plus CD, with ease. What drive you buy depends on what you plan to do: read discs and burn DVDs, or burn BD-R discs for archiving/backup?įor reading and writing DVD, most drives will be just fine. I don't believe anyone makes a consumer grade UHD BD-ROM drive commercially. I haven't kept up with UHD BD, but my understanding is that a very limited subset of BD-ROM and BD-RW drives can be flashed to support UHD BD. They're still pretty much at the price point that they launched on the market at. Blu-Ray automatically makes it expensive compared to DVD, because they were never popular enough for computers to get into the economies of scale of commodities.

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