Creative's DVD-RAM drive..........................
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DVD-RAM Drives Arrive September 17, 1998
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Creative PC-DVD RAM
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This sounds like a snake oil sales pitch: Get one drive that will satisfy your backup needs with more than 5GB capacity in each $30 cartridge, read DVD-ROM and DVD movie disks, as well as all your different format CD disks. All this is included, plus a PCI bus-mastering SCSI-2 adapter for $500 (direct). Sound too good to be true? Nope, it sounds like the Creative PC-DVD RAM.
The kit consists of an internal drive and an Adaptec AVA-2902I adapter card. The drive looks like a typical CD-ROM drive, but press the eject button and the tray that slides out is clearly something different. The slotted tray is designed to accept the DVD-RAM media cartridges. There's also a slot for DVD-ROM and CD-ROM disks.
The Matsushita-made drive is compatible with a wide range of DVD and CD formats. It can also be used to read and write PD (phase-change dual) media used in the Matsushita PD/CD drives. DVD-RAM uses a similar phase-change technology to make the disks read/ write/erasable. This backward compatibility means this one drive can read a wide range of formats.
The drive works exactly like a hard disk. Windows 95 users can rely on the Universal Disk Format (UDF), which allows you to format the entire 2.6GB per side of the double-sided media as a single partition, even on Windows 95 systems running with FAT16. Windows 98 users can format the disks using FAT32, which results in about 4MB less capacity than UDF.
The drive is fast by optical disk standards. On our tests, we managed sustained sequential read rates of 1,350 KBps for DVD-RAM, 2,800 KBps for DVD-ROM, and 1,760 for CD-ROM. We also tested PD media and saw a sustained sequential read rate of 1,100 KBps.
The drive has fairly slow access times, however. The specifications call for average seek times of 120 ms for DVD-RAM media, and 85 ms for DVD-ROM and CD formats. When we copied five files totaling 20MB from the hard disk to the DVD-RAM drive, we got an average write rate of just 455 KBps, which was about one-third the observed sustained read rate.
The only major limitation is that the kit doesn't include MPEG-2 decoding. To watch DVD movies on your system, you'll need to add a card for this.
In spite of this slower write rate, DVD-RAM media and Creative Labs' kit look like winners and could unseat the other drive formats from their drive bays.
Creative PC-DVD RAM. Direct price: $500. Requires: 8MB RAM, 5MB hard disk space, Microsoft Windows 95. Creative Labs, Milpitas, CA; 800-998-1000, 408-428-6600; www.soundblaster.com.
- Alfred Poor
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