The LiteOn External Blu-ray Disc Combo is an easy way to add Blu-ray playback to your computer. Its slim, stylish design makes it especially useful for small media centre PCs.

Setup was easy – all we had to do was connect the drive to two USB ports (one for data, one for power) and our test computer was ready to read and write Blu-ray discs.

The drive itself is slim and light enough to carry around, and when connected to a laptop with HDMI out, it makes an excellent portable Blu-ray player that can be connected quickly to a HD TV.

The drive comes with Cyberlink PowerDVD software, which allows playback of 3D Blu-rays. It's a good program with well implemented internet features, turning the LiteOn External Blu-ray Disc Combo into an incredibly versatile device. Its 3D Blu-ray compatibility and the fact that it runs almost completely silently will be big draws for dedicated movie fans.

This drive can also read and write to a huge array of disc formats, including BD-ROM, BD-RE and DVD-RAM, which makes it a great purchase for much more than just home entertainment. When it comes to playing Blu-ray movies, performance is unaffected by the fact that the drive is external, and high definition content looked incredible on our test monitor.

If you're interested in playing full-screen high definition material – especially in 3D – remember that your computer needs enough graphical power to keep everything running smoothly; underpowered computers will lead to stuttering. A fairly recent machine with a dedicated graphics card will have no problem playing back Blu-rays though.

Another thing that's worth noting before you buy is that your monitor must be connected to your PC via either DVI or HDMI, because Blu-ray playback isn't possible over a VGA cable.

Reading and writing Blu-ray discs took slightly longer than with internal drives, but in our eyes the convenience of the external drive makes up for the disparity.

The Pioneer BDR-206MBK is a first in the disc storage market. Although it looks like a conventional internal Blu-ray writer, it has a neat trick up its sleeve: the ability to write Blu-ray discs in the latest and most expansive optical media format.

Using BDXL disc technology, it can write in triple-layer 100GB or dual-layer 128GB capacities. Brand new, uncharted waters can be expensive though, and the BDR-206MBK is no exception.

Sure, its price has been reduced recently, and it's certainly within the reach of the average person. However, it's not the cost of the writer that's really the problem – it's the price of the discs.

At around £80 for one 100GB disc at present – yes, you read that right – it's just not financially viable and you'll be lucky to find them for sale anywhere.

Thank heavens it at least comes with the software needed to write BDXL discs – in this case CyberLink Power2Go. A 50GB disc costs just £10, so BDXL doesn't make much financial sense unless you really must burn over 100GB of data onto a single disc.

Alternatively, if you need more storage, you could buy a 1TB portable hard drive, which will take up less space than a stack of 10 100GB discs for the same money.

Slow storage

There's also the issue of speed, or lack thereof. In tests, the BDR- 206MBK took around two hours to write 100GB. Admittedly, the data burned to disc was a folder with hundreds of different types and sizes of files, but even so, this is even slower than the lethargic 4x write speed stated by Pioneer.

The final nail in the coffin is that BDXL discs can only be read by a BDXL player – which at the moment is only the BDR-206MBK. If you want to take your media from PC to PC, you'll have to make sure it comes with a supporting player, which is pretty unlikely.

Our advice: wait until the format is adopted and the cost of discs comes right down, or look elsewhere for your storage.

Six years have passed since the last consumer Mac was made that included an optical drive that wasn’t capable of burning CDs, so you might think us crazy to suggest spending more than a basic MacBook Pro costs on a device that burns CDs. It does more, however.

It’s a single box that both burns and prints CDs and even dual-layer DVDs. (There’s also a separate Blu-ray model.)

You load 50 printable discs into the hopper in the top, and then, when you send a job from the PrintWrite software, it will first burn, then print the disc, and send it to the output hopper at the front of the device. And if you ask for more than one copy of a disc, the G3 can be printing the first at the same time as the second is being burned.

It took just over 40 minutes to create 10 printed, burned copies of an audio CD, and that included four and a half minutes to cache the copy to hard disk from a physical disc.

Print quality is excellent – it’s an HP engine – and while not waterproof, discs can at least cope with small splashes. CDs are quite cheap to print at around 15p per disc.

It’s not perfect, however. Mac OS X 10.6 isn’t supported, though Microboards hopes to rectify that soon.

Of more concern though is the quirkiness of the software and the setup. We had a few issues getting it sorted, and though it may not be the norm, it’s nevertheless true that the PrintWrite software isn’t as well presented or easy to use as it could be. There’s not even a basic app for laying out your labels – you’d have to create them in, and export them from, another program – and the results you see in the preview don’t always match the printed output.

The calibration routine was useless, and we ended up centring the output through guesswork; luckily it’s a job you only need do once.

Nobody would argue that this is a mass-market product, and it’s priced accordingly, but once you’ve bent it to your will, it’s fast and efficient. We’d like to be able to have tested it hard for six months to get an idea of its robustness, but we’re optimistic it would stand up to moderate use.

Mac Pro owners enjoy two bays for internal optical drives, but as the rest of us don't have this luxury, a portable external disc burner is the natural choice for a second, such as the LaCie Mobile DVD±RW.

LaCie's Portable DVD±RW is powered by your Mac's USB port, or two using the bundled USB power lead if it needs more than one supply – though it managed fine with one port on both our aluminium iMac and MacBook Air.

It can burn CDs, DVDs, Dual Layer DVDs, rewritable media and DVD-RAM, and offers LightScribe technology for burning labels directly onto compatible media.

The LaCie Portable DVD±RW is extremely light in the hand, and is pretty small too. It's just the thing for your laptop bag. The shiny black finish that quickly gathers fingerprints is less welcome, though.

Solid burn speeds

In operation, the LaCie put in a solid if unspectacular performance, with the trade-off between portability and speed taking its toll. Using the bundled Toast 9 Basic application, it copied and verified a 7.6GB Dual Layer DVD in one hour, nine minutes and 22 seconds, reaching an average write speed of 3x.

It took 42 minutes, 22 seconds, averaging 4x speeds, to burn the same data from a disc image: respectable for a portable burner.

The Mac edition of the LaCie Portable DVD±RW is £10-£15 more expensive than the PC version and sports a feature-restricted version of Toast 9. If that doesn't grab you, LaCie says you can buy the PC edition and save a few quid.

Ten years ago, I purchased a DVD-playing, CD-writing combo drive for £200. It was rubbish. It took years to burn a CD that would play about four times before skipping more than a schoolgirl boxer, and it would only play about one in ten of the DVDs I owned.

Now, I'm presented with much the same thing, only this time it's a Blu-ray burner. Thing is, in the interim we've encountered a little something called convergence. With 250GB portable hard drives, costing less than a third of the price, and having five times the amount of storage, it does seem that Blu-ray burners are a dying breed.

Pioneer's effort will write 19GB of files to a two-speed rewritable Blu-Ray disc in a mere two and a half hours, which gives you something to do between watching paint dry and waiting for Godot. A writable Blu-ray disc fared better, cutting that down to 12 minutes, which is rather impressive.

There are a couple of uses for Blu-ray discs; they're good for archiving files, and handy if you want to burn hi-def videos to show on Blu-ray players. But, in the latter case, most Blu-ray players (ie. PS3s) accept a USB, so you can easily connect your cheapo USB hard disks crammed full of hi-def lovin'.

If you're sure you need a Blu-ray burner, then the BDR-203 is the best, and cheapest option. It's just a shame that there's a sense that the tech is already obsolete.

There's little sign yet of software being distributed on Blu-ray, and unless you have a huge screen, watching high-definition movies on your PC will offer no advantage over DVD.

So while a Blu-ray drive might not seem like a must-have for the average PC user at the moment, this is ignoring its potential for backing up your data.

With a capacity of up to 50GB (for dual-layer disks) it'll take far fewer disks to back up your system than if you were using DVDs. You'd still end up with quite a stack of disks if you back up a complete 1TB hard drive, but in practice most people will back up much less than this.

The BDR-203BK writer is pretty comprehensive in the types of Blu-ray, DVD and CD variants that it'll handle, and it offers an unrivalled 8x BD-R write speed (2x for BD-RE). At the moment this is a bit of future-proofing, though, since the fastest BD-R media you'll currently find is 4x.

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This is the first Blu-ray drive specifically for PC users that doesn't write to recordable BD media and, believe it or not, this is a significant milestone for Blu-ray.

For the reasons highlighted above, an affordable Blu-ray option for PC users means we can finally watch some hi-definition movies (with a suitable decoder and HDCP compliant graphics card) on our screens, without having to shell out for a whole system upgrade.

The BDC-S02 also writes to all CD and DVD media. This could make it a one-stop replacement for your existing optical drive.

It isn't as fast as the latest DVD writers on the market: 4x for dual layer recording means a significant wait to fill a 9.4GB disc. Normal DVD-R writing tops out at 12x, slower than a standard DVD writer that costs a lot less.

At £169 this drive is affordable but hardly a bargain, considering HD-DVD set-top players can be had for a lot less. It's clear that this drive is worth looking at if you're absolutely desperate to watch Blu-ray on your PC, but otherwise it's something of a waste of money.

Wait for the formats to bed in. That's often what the sceptics say about emerging technologies, but with Blu-ray on your PC they might just be right.

The best DVD recorder in the business only sets you back around £35, whereas this first high-definition drive from Pioneer costs a princely £130.

Awkward compatibility

Ultimately, a purchase like this comes down to how desperately you need to have a Blu-ray drive in your machine, but you also need to take a good look at the specifications, because it won't work with every PC.

Note that this is a SATA optical drive. The format's still proving unpopular on motherboards and there's no IDE alternative, so you need either a converter or a different motherboard/PSU combination.

Furthermore, this drive will only run if your graphics card natively supports HD. Both ATI and Nvidia have supported H.264 acceleration on their chipsets for some time now, but it's still not clear-cut.

Generally, you'll need an ATi Radeon X1600 or above, or an Nvidia GeForce 6600 GT or above. To be absolutely sure, look for cards that have the PureVideo or Avivo branding, although these are limited to just a few cards at the higher end of the range.

Crystal clear

We tested on a Core 2 Duo Vista machine with the latest Bond movie, Casino Royale. While we were delighted with the playback on a 19-inch monitor, it took a few direct comparisons with the DVD version of the movie to notice any difference.

The colours were certainly darker and the sharpness perhaps a little deeper, but on monitor playback at least the differences were very small.

TV is a different matter though, and with large LCD and plasma HD displays you're sure to see the clarity differences amplified and you'll see what people mean when they talk about HD. For now at least, HD on your PC is an expensive and extravagant option, but if you really can't wait for HD on your desktop then this drive has all you need.

At a claimed 20x speed, many modern drives appear to destroy the barriers put in front of them by physics.

NEC's low-cost attempt, rated only at 18x, certainly has a go, but falls marginally short of shattering any barriers. Burning onto 16x certified media, it never quite hit the mark, topping out at 15.92x only briefly at the end of the burn, and averaging out at a languid 11.72x.

We would have expected a little faster push as the spindle speeds increased, but this didn't transpire. At least you can be comforted by the black fascia included in the box; perfect for hiding the common beige drive in a media centre, although you may find, as we did, that the fastening method leaves the drive front suspiciously loose.

However, this is a perfectly competent drive for the price, but it didn't exactly amaze us.

Pioneer is carving a name for itself as a manufacturer of quality, sensibly priced drives. The recording speeds on offer here are an improvement over previous products, making DVR-112 an excellent upgrade choice.

The DVR-112 reads and writes DVD-RAM, DVD-R/RW, R/RW and CD-R/ RW formats. Buffer under-run protection for CD/DVD ensures that your discs are finished correctly and with Pioneer's Performance Adjusting Firmware, the device will automatically optimise the disc's rotation speed depending on your application. For example, if you're watching a movie or listening to music, the disc velocity is reduced to keep background noise to a minimum.

The writer does well to write once at 18x for DVD media (DVD-R and R), and 10x to write once for Dual Layer/Double Layer (DL) media (DVD-R DL and R DL). We also liked the multi-effect Liquid Crystal Tilt Compensator, which further improves recording and playback characteristics. To aid recording, Ultra-DRA (Dynamic Resonance Absorber) technology suppresses vibration caused by imbalanced discs.

The fact that this burner is a writer and DVD-RAM drive makes it a winner. It's a great, all-in-one drive that covers all the bases of an optical drive. DVD-RAM is considered to be a highly reliable format these days because the discs have built-in error control and a defect management system. Drives like this are recommended for traditional tasks such as data storage, backup and archiving.

Avoid colour fading

We reviewed the cream-coloured version of the drive, which tends to look dirty and faded as soon as you use it. Thankfully, it's also available in black, so you should be able to purchase one that suits your system.

Whatever version you choose though, make sure that the 5.25-inch drive is securely fixed in your PC's case. If you allow the drive to vibrate in an improperly secured drive bay then write speeds will be affected slightly. You may have to tweak the drive's physical attachments for best results.