Japanese Buffalo announced the ATAPI BR-H2FB as well the external USB BR-H2U2 Blu-ray drives for PCs, both available in the beginning of June.
The price of the BR-H2U2 is expected to be around 110,250 Yen ($960,11) and 121,800 Yen ($1060,7) for the BR-H2FB5.
The upcoming drives are based on the Panasonic SW-5582 Blu-ray drive. They support 8x recording for DVD+R/-R, 4x for DVD+R/-R DL, 6x for DVD+RW and 5x for DVD-RAM. The drives also offer 24x/16x/32x features for CD-R/RW formats and 2x writing for BD-R/RE for both single layer and double-layer media.
The drives will also read BD-ROMs at 2x, while reproduction of Hollywood content stored on BD-ROM media will require a firmware upgrade.
System requirements for recording on BD-R/RE media include a PC equipped with a Pentium 4 1.8GHz or higher, 512MB of memory, or more. For reproduction of BD-ROM content, Buffalo suggests the Geforce 6600GT/7600GT/7900GT, ATI X1800/X1900 (VRAM 256MB or higher) video cards, Moreover, when the video card is equipped with a DVI/HDMI output, the PC monitor should be HDCP-ready.