DVD-RAM drives..................................
pcworld.com
Massive Storage: DVD-RAM Style
DVD-RAM drives offer multigigabyte removable storage--at a price.
by Jon L. Jacobi, special to PC World
March 24, 1999, 5:49 p.m. PT
DVD-RAM--still the only rewritable DVD format available--reminds me of the little engine that could, thinking it can make it to the top of the mountain, while a trainload of costly add-ons is holding it back. Meanwhile, relatively less expensive CD-Recordable and CD-Rewritable drives are still selling in mass quantities. Compounding DVD-RAM's travails is the fact that it's still hard to find much of a product selection. And the waters remain muddied by the possibility of competition from future DVD+RW products.
With DVD+RW still in the category of vaporware, however, DVD-RAM is a viable removable storage choice for many people. If you're looking for a high-capacity, removable-media backup option where performance isn't paramount, a DVD-RAM drive could be a good buy.
The question is, which one? There are currently three manufacturers with competing drive mechanisms: Hitachi, Panasonic, and Toshiba. None of these currently has its own branded kit, and you'll find the mechanisms included in kits sold by third-party vendors, such as Creative Labs, Hi-Val, and others.
To evaluate the mechanisms available, we reviewed Creative Labs' PC/DVD RAM kit and two of Hi-Val's DVDRAM-4 kits, which use your choice of Panasonic LF-D101 or Toshiba SD-W1101 mechanisms. Although I couldn't find a retail source for the Hitachi GF-1050 drive, it may be found in some third-party kits; the vendor sent me a mechanism to include for reference. All these are SCSI drives. Toshiba says it plans to manufacture an ATAPI mechanism in the future, which will be a first.
Hi-Val--a major seller of end-user kits--offers a choice of drive mechanism. Creative Labs wouldn't specify the mechanism it provided: Although it appeared in the SCSI BIOS startup message as 'Creative Labs 1220S', it's a dead ringer for a Panasonic in both performance and appearance.
Mass Removable Storage
One thing is clear: The latest DVD-RAM drives give you storage by the ton. The cartridges they use can hold a hefty 5.2GB (2.6GB per side). Each cartridge stores about as much information as eight CD-ROMs and costs approximately $35 (around 1.5 cents per MB).
The drives read all types of CD and DVD media, including CD-ROM, CD audio, CD-R, CD-RW, DVD-ROM, and DVD movies. Unfortunately, none can write to CD media, so you can't burn audio CDs or share data with friends and colleagues who have only CD-ROM drives. Nor can you share DVD-RAM media with others who don't have DVD-RAM drives.
I found that the DVD-RAM drives appear as two drives to the operating system: a normal DVD-ROM drive and a removable-cartridge drive. You access the appropriate drive according to the kind of media you have inserted.
Drives in Use
Performance with DVD-based media was about the same for all the drives, although the Panasonic-based units were by far the quickest with CD-based media. There was little difference in installation and usability--which was similar to that of any SCSI removable-media storage device.
I used a 200-MHz Pentium II system with 32MB of RAM and a Buslogic FlashPoint LW SCSI adapter to run the four drives through their paces. Specifically, the Creative Labs and Hi-Val Panasonic-based drives were the fastest at reading all types of non-DVD media--performing at about the speed of an average 20X CD-ROM drive in my informal tests. The Toshiba-based Hi-Val was significantly slower, while the Hitachi was slower still.
All drives offered DVD-ROM playback performance that was more than adequate, though the Hitachi's 1MB buffer (the other drives have a 2MB buffer) made it more prone to dropping movie frames when other tasks were being run in the background. DVD-RAM write performance was almost identical among all the drives: The Panasonic copied 100MB of data to disc in a hair over 6 minutes, with the Toshiba and Hitachi trailing by only a few seconds.
What should have been a major advantage for the Hi-Val Toshiba drive is its ability to function as two logical drives without using the software driver that the three other units require. This would enable you to use Windows Explorer to drag and drop files to your cartridge.
Unfortunately, using the Toshiba in this mode with a SCSI-based system slowed Windows to a crawl. With an EIDE main hard drive, the slowdown was still noticeable, but not as pronounced. To improve performance in my tests, I disabled this mode and used the same software I used with the Hi-Val Panasonic mechanism. Toshiba is making changes in the firmware that it says will improve performance; the company will also be bundling a driver.
What You Get
As previously mentioned, you don't get off cheap with DVD-RAM. You'll need a SCSI adapter if you don't already have one, and you may need an MPEG-2 decoder. As a rule of thumb, PCs below 300 MHz usually need the decoder for processing MPEG-2 compression in DVD movies.
Both Hi-Val and Creative Labs will sell you just a drive or a bundle with a SCSI adapter and/or the MPEG-2 decoder card. Creative Labs sells its drive solo for $499.99. Adding an Adaptec AVA 2902I SCSI-2 adapter ups the ante to $549.99. If you need the Dxr2 MPEG-2 decoder card Creative sells you'll pay $699.99. If you need both the SCSI and MPEG-2 cards, you'll pay $749.99.
Hi-Val's products are considerably more expensive, with the bare drives costing $650, a drive with an Adaptec 2904 SCSI adapter going for $700, and a drive plus Real Magic Hollywood Plus 98 A3/A4 MPEG-2 decoder running $735. If you need SCSI and MPEG-2 both, you'll pay $839.
While Creative Labs offers the lowest price of the batch, you can't specify the make of drive you want. Hi-Val on the other hand will give you your choice of either the Panasonic or Toshiba drives--but charge you more. The biggest difference is in the cost of the drive itself. If you're buying the drive alone--and you're getting the mechanism we tested--the Creative Labs drive is a significantly better deal, though Hi-Val's price for a complete bundle remains much more competitive.
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