Testing:

To test the Hitachi/LG BH20L 6x Blu-ray burner, it was installed in a system with the following other components:

» Intel Core 2 Duo E6750 (2.66GHz) processor
» Gigabyte GA-P35C-DS3R motherboard
» eVGA GTX 275 PCIe video card
» Seagate 80GB SATA 3Gbps hard drive
» Seagate 1.5TB SATA 3Gbps hard drive
» 4GB OCZ Technology Gold 1333MHz DDR3 memory
» Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit operating system
» Nero Ultimate 7
» Optical Quantum 4X Blu-Ray (BD-R)

The first thing that needs to be done is a quick check on the firmware. While Windows 7 recognized the drive, and enabled it, Nero would not burn to it (so a $1.25 Blu-ray coaster was made). Running the B57C firmware update (found here) resolved the issue.

When burning a Blu-ray disc, make sure you are burning it as a UDF disc, and not the common ISO9660. Depending on your specific use, I found it best to force it to UDF 2.5. Thankfully Nero gives you the ability to choose either automatic or manual selection of the version. After creating a disc in automatic mode, I attempted to play a Blu-ray with many videos on it on a Playstation 3, and was presented with mixed results. It would not list all the videos, and playback was extremely choppy. Burning the same files as UDF 2.5 resolved the issue.

Testing the Blu-ray burning ability of the Hitachi/LG BH20L involved writing a folder consisting of approximately 23GB of video files to disc. The BH20L was used to execute the same test at 6x and 4x speeds, and the results were compared to theoretical speeds provided by Wikipedia.



The above chart shows that the results achieved by the Hitachi/LG BH20L drive are almost double what the theoretical speed is (lower values are better).

While the Hitachi/LG BH20L drive's main purpose is to burn Blu-ray, it is also capable of burning DVDs and CDs. Using a Sony DVD/CD burner for reference, a folder of smaller files was burned to both DVD and CD media, and the results are shown below.



Lower values are better for this test, so you can see that the BH20L holds a slight edge over the Sony brand drive when burning DVDs and CDs at the same speed.