The BW-U101 promises high capacities and increased data reliability powered by Blu-Ray.. The coming year is expected to be the most exciting as groups supporting the two incompatible and competing technologies introduced new partners and revealed further details of what consumers and manufacturers can expect to see from them. While the battle over next-generation DVD formats heat up lately and the first blue laser devices have been already demonstrated in Technology Shows worldwide, CDRInfo takes a first look in the Sony BW-U101 Professional Disc for Data Unit.

Sony describes the external device as "Professional Disc for Data Unit", a Sony Corporation trademark. The device we have in our hands is the USB 2.0 external version, while Sony alternatively offers a SCSI-3 version (BW-S101). Both write-once and re-writable discs (cartridged) are supported, offering a maximum capacity of 23GB. A short-wave blue violet laser with a wavelength of 405 nm combined with a 0.85 numerical aperture of the objective lens allow high capacities and data reliability.

Sony offers user the flexibility to choose either CLV or CAV strategies for read/write, allowing for a 9MB/s write data speed and a 10.8MB/s read data speed. In addition, background formatting as well as data verification functions improve the reliability of the recorded data. More information and some performance benchmarks will be available in out review database very soon.