Blu-ray Disc recordable

Sony plans to gradually cease its manufacturing of optical media, including recordable Blu-ray discs.

Even Blu-ray drives released after that date may not necessarily support BDXL unless explicitly stated.

[23] 62,500,864 sectors A single-layer Blu-ray disc (BD-R and BD-RE) has a capacity of 25,025,314,816 bytes, which are 23,866 MiB.

Within the "Volume Space", the capacity that can be occupied by the content of files is also slightly reduced by file system overhead and by slack space as well, but the amount of slack space is trivial given that file systems on optical discs use a low cluster size (also referred to as "logical sector size") of 2 KiB (2048 bytes), matching the size of a single physical sector on optical discs.

[27] The spare area is where the drive stores addresses for unreadable sectors so they are replaced with new data in case.

Burn programs may detect the unformatted state and automatically format the medium before beginning to write.

[30] Write verification is a feature of formatted Blu-ray media, officially called "Defect Management".

Defect management can be deactivated by burn programs using a feature called "Stream Recording" which enables full nominal write speed.

Whether defect management is beneficial with mediocre media depends much on the individual medium and the drive's firmware.

It works well with narrowly located bad spots but tends to fail more often than stream recording if the drive perceives reduced read quality on the whole medium.

The information below describes the different types of recording layers that may be used on BD-R and BD-RE discs.

"Normal" BD-R discs use a composite (or, in the case of BD-RE, a phase-changing alloy) that decreases its reflectivity on recording, i.e. "High To Low".

Melting the material with a very high power beam turns it into an amorphous state with low reflectivity, while heating at a lower power erases it back to a crystalline state with high reflectivity.

[52][53] BD-R LTH is a write-once Blu-ray Disc format that features an organic dye recording layer.

[56] Sony upgraded the PlayStation 3 firmware enabling BD-R LTH reading in March, 2008.