Plextor Brings Out Its Fastest Blu-Ray Writer Yet, The PX-LB950UE [Plextor's External Blu-Ray Writer Includes USB 3.0 and eSATA Connections For High Speed Burning]

Posted on TFTS by Steve Anderson on Wednesday, 27. April 2011 under: Computers & Computing, USB Devices

As ubiquitous as DVD burners are today, so too will (in all likelihood) Blu-ray burners be tomorrow. At least, that’s what will happen if places like Plextor have anything to say about it, especially since they’re bringing out some thoroughly high-tension hardware like the PX-LB950UE Blu-ray burner.

The Plextor PX-LB950UE represents their fastest such burner yet, using both USB 3.0 and eSATA connections to get speeds up to 12x, which actually doubles the speed of their previous version. The PX-LB950UE can use both single and dual layer discs (no word on if that includes BDXL in there), and can work with LightScribe technology, allowing you to burn a label into your Blu-ray with the same drive you used to burn the information onto it in the first place.

Of course, it’s hard to say whether this is really a good value or not, depending on what side you find yourself in the physical media / streaming debate. There are plenty of people out there (like me, frankly) who like the idea of having their media on hand whenever they like, and consider the costs involved with storing and preserving said media a small price to pay to be able to get hands on media in an Internet outage or when someone gives forth with the piteous cry of “the cloud is down”. Cloud storage has its place, sure–it’s hard not to at least have some respect for a system that lets you keep incredible amounts of data stored and easily accessible from anywhere– but keeping a physical backup on hand is never a bad thing. Just ask anyone who’s survived a hard drive crash if they regretted burning their really important stuff to a USB drive.

And if you want to make sure you’ll always have Blu-rays to burn, you too can pick up a Plextor PX-LB950UE right now for $239, which really isn’t that terrible a price for an external Blu-ray burner.