Do you need a Blu-ray optical drive for your laptop or desktop computer? I guess the answer to that question would depend on who I ask and what you intend to use the Blu-ray drive for. Do you need a Blu-ray player just for playing movies and installing software, or do you need to be able to copy files to and from Blu-ray rewritable disks?

Blu-ray Movies

I don't own a Blu-ray optical drive. I can't even rent movies using the Blu-ray format locally. They aren't carried here — the only movies I can rent are in either the single-layer or dual-layer DVD format (5 gigabytes or 9 gigabytes). My desktop computer has a writable DVD drive and my netbook doesn't even have an optical drive.

Despite what you may read elsewhere, the Blu-ray movies display fine on both laptops and desktop computers as long as the computers have at least a gigabyte of memory in them. Less than that and video playback will be choppy. Of course, you need a decent computer monitor or you're wasting your time. Anything less than 1024×600 won't be worth watching, in my opinion. The reason is because it's high definition video and it has nothing to do with being a Blu-ray disk.

If you copy part of a high definition movie from a Blu-ray disk to a standard DVD, the movie will play just the same. I have actually tested this to be sure.

Blu-ray Disks

There are four types of Blu-ray disks available for computers:

• Single-layer, non-rewritable
• Dual-layer, non-rewritable
• Single-layer, rewritable
• Dual layer, rewritable

The single-layer Blu-ray disk capacity is 25 gigabytes while the dual-layer capacity is 50 gigabytes. This is probably meaningless to you unless you intend to copy or store files using a Blu-ray optical drive capable of "burning" data.

File Storage

I'll use movies converted to a DivX-compatible (.avi) format as an example of how much data a Blu-ray disk can hold.

The average non-high definition movie converted from a standard DVD is around 700 megabytes and the average high-definition is about double that size. The actual storage capacity of a Blu-ray disk is less than the maximum because the file table and directory structure is stored on the Blu-ray disk as well as the raw data.

A 25 gigabyte Blu-ray disk can hold somewhere around 35 standard definition movies, after conversion and around 17 high-definition movies after conversion, if the high definition movies are at the older 720 pixel resolution. It will be much less for movies at the 1080 pixel resolution and I haven't seen the actual file sizes for those.

All of it depends on the original files sizes, of course, so the numbers I'm throwing out are ballpark figures.

The Original Question

Back to the original question, do you actually need a Blu-ray optical drive? I don't think you need to replace a standard DVD drive, but if you're getting a new drive for other reasons, then it would be wise to get a Blu-ray drive.

The Blu-ray drives can play the older formats, from dual-layer DVD down to standard music CD. Depending on the model, I'm sure they'll write to rewritable disks of the lesser formats as well.

In my opinion, and mine alone, you should always buy the optical drive with the highest capacity available. I think you should take your time, though, because the price may be higher than what you expect to spend. Every time an optical disk format is invented that can hold a much higher capacity of data, and the optical drives which can play and write to them become available, the price of the previously most popular format tends to drop dramatically.

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