Lite-On Announces Q3 Launch of Blu-ray Drive

The LH-2B1S will be the first Lite-On drive with Blu-ray Disc technology

Lite-On, the optical storage device company that took over BenQ's optical disc drive manufacturing process, has announced that it will be shipping Blu-ray drives in August of this year. The LH-2B1S will be the first Lite-On drive with Blu-ray Disc technology.

Blu-ray is capable of storing up to 50GB of data on a dual layer disk or 25GB on a single layer, more than five times the storage capacity of traditional DVDs. The drive will also be compatible with single and dual layer DVD±R media as well as CD-R/RW media. Verbatim also announced this week that it will begin shipping 2X Blu-ray media.

In addition to the high storage capacity, data transfer speeds will increase as it will feature the Serial ATA interface. Along with this announcement Lite-On also announced that BenQ will abandon manufacturing in favor of Lite-On. DailyTech reported that Lite-On was taking over BenQ’s optical storage manufacturing earlier this year.