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Technology Stocks : C-Cube -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Tim McCormick who wrote (48804)	3/15/2000 9:00:00 PM
From: John Rieman	Respond to of 50808

Creative's DVD-RAM drive for $299...................... pcworld.com DVD-RAM: Waiting in the Wings If you're looking for more capacity than CD-RW can provide, DVD-RAM may be your answer--as long as you can live with some significant limitations. Creative Labs recently dropped the price on its 2X DVD-RAM drive to $299--about the price of an 8X CD-RW drive. These drives read and write cartridges containing 2.6GB of single-sided or 5.2GB of double-sided media--about nine times the capacity of a packet-written CD-RW. DVD-RAM media costs about $15 to $20 per side, about the same price per megabyte as CD-RW discs. Single-sided media can be popped out of its protective cartridge and read in some (but not all) of the newest DVD-ROM drives. Better yet, DVD-RAM drives can read (but not write) CD-ROM, CD-R, CD-RW, and DVD-ROM media. Unfortunately, far fewer people own DVD-ROM drives than own CD-ROM drives, so it's harder to share data. We took three drives from the current crop for informal test spins: the Panasonic LF-D103, Hi-Val's SDW1101 kit (which includes a Sigma Designs MPEG decoder card), and Creative Labs' PC-DVD RAM. Some vendors include decoder cards or sell them separately--they improve MPEG playback but have no effect on writing performance. Unlike with CD-R and CD-RW, you can't write DVD-RAM discs in sessions--you must use packet writing. As with CD-R and CD-RW, packet writing gobbles up some disc space for file-system duties. But at only 300MB per 2.6GB side, that's a much lower percentage of the disc's total capacity. The drives in our tests read DVD-RAM media at slightly better than 8X, comparing favorably to the roughly 7X the CD-RW drives managed with their own media. However, the 2X DVD-RAM drives wrote at roughly half the speed of 4X CD-RW drives. The Creative Labs PC-DVD RAM's performance and price make it our pick among the three. But stay tuned--new 4X/4.7GB-per-side drives will soon appear. The high-capacity drives, with room to fit an entire movie per side, will cost a hefty $700 or more.