Bluray Drives: 2x vs 4x vs 6x vs 8x read/write speed comparison

Question

I couldn't find a duplicate question, but I was wondering what the differences are between different read/write speeds for Bluray drive. I'm planning on buying one for a build but don't know if I can cheap out on getting a Bluray 2x drive or spend more money for a quality Bluray 8x drive. Will I just experience more lag/buffering times for Bluray discs on a 2x and none for a 6x or 8x?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Copy pasted from http://www.blu-ray.com/faq/:

How fast can you read/write data on a Blu-ray disc?

According to the Blu-ray Disc specification, 1x speed is defined as 36Mbps. However, as BD-ROM movies will require a 54Mbps data transfer rate the minimum speed we're expecting to see is 2x (72Mbps). Blu-ray also has the potential for much higher speeds, as a result of the larger numerical aperture (NA) adopted by Blu-ray Disc. The large NA value effectively means that Blu-ray will require less recording power and lower disc rotation speed than DVD and HD-DVD to achieve the same data transfer rate. While the media itself limited the recording speed in the past, the only limiting factor for Blu-ray is the capacity of the hardware. If we assume a maximum disc rotation speed of 10,000 RPM, then 12x at the outer diameter should be possible (about 400Mbps). This is why the Blu-ray Disc Association (BDA) already has plans to raise the speed to 8x (288Mbps) or more in the future.

Apart from that Wikipedia's entrance for Blu ray disc has some nice speed comparison, but I couldn't paste that since it's in a table. See here

Answer 2

Wikipedia page has nice comparison of all Blu-ray read and write speeds: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blu-ray_Disc_recordable