Blu-ray recordable drives for desktop PCs are almost ready to ship but still need some bugs ironing out, according to early tests carried out by IT Week labs. The standard, designed to supersede DVDs, enables users to store up to 25GB of files on a single-layer Blu-ray disk.

We looked at an engineering sample of Samsung's BD-Writer, which is set to ship in late April. Although we were able to write and verify files using Nero Express 7 authoring software with beta support for Blu-ray, our test system was unable to read the disks using Windows Explorer. Samsung said this was likely due to issues with the beta support in Nero.

Our tests used rewritable BD-RE media supplied by TDK, and we were able to write a 12GB file set in 23 minutes, which rates the drive with a write speed of about 8.7MB/s.

Samsung's BD-Writer will support triple-write capability when it ships, meaning the drive can record to CD and DVD media as well as Blu-ray disks. Pioneer's BDR-101A drive, which is now expected late in April, will only be backwards compatible with DVD media initially.

Chas Kalsi, European technical manager at Samsung, said his firm hopes to support dual-layer writing in production models from the outset. This would double storage capacity to 50GB with compatible Blu-ray media. The drive firmware can also be upgraded via Samsung's LiveUpdate web service to add this capability at a later date.

The BD-Writer is expected to cost about £350, according to Samsung.

Update: Samsung has confirmed that the retail price of the drive will be $1000 (£570).