Buffalo will start shipping 8x Blu-ray burners in Japan. The company will release it's external USB2.0/eSATA drive, named BR-816SU2 and its internal SATA drive with model name BR-816FBS next month. Both drives are OEMs of the Panasonic SW-5584 Blu-ray burner and support 8x on single layer BD-R discs, 2x for dual layer BD-R and BD-RE discs and have an 8MB buffer.
The maximum recording speed of 8x can be achieved only when the external drive is connected through the eSATA interface. When connected using USB 2.0 the BD-R burning speed is limited at 6.5x.
Besides Blu-ray burning the drives support 16x burning for DVD-R/DVD+R, 5x for DVD-RAM, 8x for DVD-R/+R DL, 6x for DVD-RW and 8x for DVD+RW. CD-R's are burned at 48x and CD-RW's at 24x.
Nice.
Price? 
A Google search revealed an article in Techshout.com that read, "The internal BR-816FBS blu-ray burner will cost 39,100 yen , while the external BR-816SU2 burner will carry the price tag of 44,500 yen."
That makes them approx. $362 USD to $412 USD.
The LG's out there now are about half that price. Why worry about faster drives untiul the price of the media drops in price.
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