DVD-RAM is campatible, if you don't try to use the same disk(Copy) on two different formats(machines) Let's just go with MO..................................
techweb.com
September 22, 1997, Issue: 1076
Section: News
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Three touting interoperability of DVD-RAMs -- Other suppliers have different specs
By Mark Hachman
Santa Clara, Calif.- With purchasers still waiting for the first volume shipments of DVD-RAM products, a trio of Japanese storage manufacturers is scrambling to combat fears that the market is fragmenting.
Hitachi Ltd., Matsushita Electric Works Ltd., and Toshiba Corp. demonstrated the interoperability of their DVD-RAM drives at a meeting of the DVD Forum here last week. By doing so, they attempted to show that compatible DVD-RAM products are ready to ship, and that competing rewritable DVD standards are, at present, little more than paper tigers.
While the DVD-RAM proponents advocate a single-layer, 2.6-Gbyte rewritable disk, a partnership of Hewlett-Packard Co., Philips Electronics N.V., and Sony Corp. has proposed a 3.0-Gbyte DVD+RW standard to a European standards body. And NEC Corp. is pursuing its own 5.2-Gbyte rewritable DVD technology.
Both the DVD-RAM and DVD+RW standards have been submitted to the ECMA, a European standards body. The DVD-RAM format 1.0, announced last week, is also being submitted to a Japanese standards body.
Although members of the DVD-RAM troika acknowledged concerns that the split might stunt the growth of the market, expected to emerge in 1998, analysts characterized the rivalries as simple jockeying for position.
"It's simply business as usual in the optical storage market," said Ted Pine, president of InfoTech Inc., Woodstock, Vt. "The short answer is that this is typical competition, similar to the variety of price/performance points offered by magneto-optical storage vendors today."
Analysts assume that rewritable DVD will become more attractive after the installed base of CD-ROM users converts to the higher-capacity DVD-ROM in the next two years. By 2000, those users will be ready to switch to DVD-RAM. The current struggle is to determine whose format becomes the medium of choice.
"If a DVD-RAM drive succeeds in combining the functions of a floppy disk drive and DVD-ROM - and it could - then vendors will need to compromise on a single standard, forcing this standards war on us now," Pine said.
While Matsushita provided only vague performance metrics at the forum meeting, Toshiba privately disclosed performance characteristics for samples of its SD-W1001 and SD-W1002 DVD-RAM drives, available in SCSI-2 and IDE interfaces, respectively. The drives' write and read times averaged 250 milliseconds and 150 ms, respectively, and their internal data transfer rate measured 11.08 Mbits/s, similar to that of a magnetic hard drive.
Hitachi's GF-1000 and GF-1050 DVD-RAM drives were announced in June, and will be sampling in the fourth quarter at $794 and $953. By contrast, Toshiba's target prices are between $300 and $500, a company representative said. The drives are sampling now to software developers.
While the DVD-RAM camp attempts to establish itself as the de facto standard by shipping first, the DVD+RW consortium is promoting its purported technology advantage.
"We would prefer to have a single unified standard, but [the DVD-RAM] camp did not want to pursue the best technology," said Dave Deane, DVD marketing manager at Hewlett-Packard, Loveland, Colo. That standard will now be determined through competition, not cooperation, he said.
DVD-RAM's disadvantages, according to Deane, include a slightly lower capacity; the inability to spin at a constant angular velocity, as a hard drive does; and its cartridge packaging, which makes it incompatible with the current generation of tray-based DVD-ROM players.
Copyright (c) 1997 CMP Media Inc. |
