Plextor PX-B310SA Blu-ray/DVD Combo SATA Drive

Jun 23 2009 - Plextor is one of the well known names for high quality drives in the optical storage market but their drives generally carry a higher price tag. The PX-B310SA is a decent Blu-ray combo drive but the $150 price tag makes it one of the more expensive in the market. Performance is decent but doesn't really push it beyond drives available for roughly 2/3 the price can do. One advantage is that the drive does run very quiet during most operation which is great for those looking to use it in a home theater PC.

Jun 16 2009 - Plextor's PX-B310SA is one of the most expensive of the current crop of Blu-ray combo drives on the market. The $150 price range puts it close to the price of many competing 6x Blu-ray burner drives. This combined with the fact that most combo drives are roughly $30 to $50 cheaper means that Plextor has a hard sell to win customers away from the likes of ASUS, LG, and LiteOn.

Blu-ray playback is pretty much limited to movies at this point and time. The Plextor PX-B310SA does an exceptional job of doing this without generating much noise from the drive operation. This is great for those wanting to limit the noise in a home theater environment.

In addition to playing back Blu-ray movies, the Plextor PX-B210SA is also a fully functioning DVD burner. The DVD recording speeds are decent and perform up to the 16x rated speed but is a bit slower overall taking 6 minutes and 10 seconds to complete. CD performance was a bit better thanks to its 48x recording speed that allowed it to burn a complete CD in just 2 minutes and 29 seconds.

One feature not in the drive is the ability to burn a label directly to a CD or DVD. Many drives now have the LightScribe feature standard for creating unique grayscale labels on compatible media.

Included with the Plextor PX-B310SA is the CyberLink BD Suite that includes PowerDVD 8, Power Producer, Power Director, Power2Go, PowerBackup and Instant Burn software. The main item that people buying this software will probably care about is the Power DVD 8 program for watching Blu-ray movies on the PC. This is an OEM version of the software that only supports 2.1 audio playback. Anyone wanting full high definition audio support will need to upgrade the package. This is typical of software packages but something that is very disappointing.