60-Minute Upgrades

Maximum Storage: Burn Movies, Burn Files

The latest internal DVD burners sell for less than $300 and support the two most popular formats: -R/RW and +R/RW. That price and the ability of rewritable DVD media to store up to 4.7GB of data on a single side are sure to appeal to archive aficionados who are dissatisfied with the CD's maximum standard capacity of 700MB. Though numerous competing DVD recording standards persist, the latest drives support multiple formats, so you don't have to choose at the checkout line.

A multiformat drive may cost up to $100 more than a single-format model, but the greater flexibility is worth the extra money. (For some choices, see Top 10 DVD Drives.) Don't overlook the venerable DVD-RAM format, which is favored for backups and archiving because of its much higher rating for rewrites and its stronger error correction. LG and Iomega offer drives that include DVD-RAM support.

Granted, many users don't need a DVD writer--not yet, anyway. If all you want to do is create CDs occasionally for your car stereo, stick with a CD burner, which is less expensive and faster than a DVD writer for this task. And if you use a high-capacity storage device such as a tape or Jaz drive to make backups, a DVD writer might seem redundant.

On the other hand, if you want to encode and write large video files to disc for playback on DVD players, a multiple-format rewritable DVD drive makes sense. According to Intellikey Labs, an independent DVD testing facility, write-once DVD+R-formatted discs have the highest compatibility with living-room DVD players, followed by write-once DVD-R. This is due to the superior reflective qualities of these discs. Rewritable discs (+RW and -RW) will work with fewer players than their write-once siblings. DVD-RAM is the least-compatible format with consumer DVD players, but most recent DVD-RAM drives also write to the highly compatible DVD-R format.

Before buying a DVD writer, make sure your system is brawny enough to handle the drive. Our PC started with a 1.4-GHz Celeron CPU, 512MB of SDRAM, and a roomy 120GB hard drive--a good starting point for video recording, which is a demanding chore for the processor, memory, and storage systems. If you want a DVD writer solely to handle data backups, though, you'll be fine with a less powerful system. Because we expect to work entirely with DVD+R/RW media, we chose the $250 HP DVD Writer DVD300i, an internal drive with impressive 4X DVD+R and 2.4X DVD+RW speeds.

The drive came with a 7-minute CD-ROM video, which we watched before installing the DVD writer, per HP's instructions. The video addresses some important installation issues, such as how to reset the master/slave pins on the back of the drive. The setup program also inspects your machine for system incompatibilities. For instance, it determined that we would have to replace our computer's existing CD-ROM drive with the new DVD300i (instead of keeping both) because "an available position was not found on either the primary or secondary [IDE] controller." In other words, the only way to free up a position on the controller was to remove the CD-ROM drive.

The installation went smoothly. We disconnected the power, audio, and data cables from the CD-ROM drive, and unscrewed it from the drive bay. We then installed the new DVD300i (making sure that all four screws were firmly attached) reconnected the cables, closed the case, and rebooted the system.

A hassle-free upgrade? Not quite. The DVD300i's installation program launched automatically and requested the setup CD-ROM, which we had left in the old drive now sitting on our kitchen table. Fortunately this turned out to be a minor oversight; a tiny hole on the front of most internal optical drives is designed for just this kind of situation. We straightened a paper clip, inserted the wire in the hole, and gave it a firm push. Presto! The CD-ROM drive tray released, and we retrieved the CD without further ado. (In the absence of a paper clip, we'd have had to attach a power connector long enough to let us push the button and eject the disc.)