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.
