Hitachi-LG Data Storage (HLDS) will this month ship the world's first 4x Blu-ray Disc recorder, it has been claimed. The higher speed applies only to recording - rewriteable BD-RE media will spin at the more commonplace 2x speed.

HLDS' GBW-H10N drive doesn't support dual-layer discs, either, so it's limited to 25GB media, Japanese-language website PCWatch reports.

The unit reads dual-layer BD-ROMs, and can read and write DVD±R/RW, DVD±R DL, DVD-RAM and CD-R/RW media. It connects to the host computer across an ATAPI bus, and contains 4MB of cache memory.

There's no word yet on pricing. ®