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2000: Year of CD-RW Drives

While rewritable DVD vendors battle, PCs will gain "dual optical" drive combos.

By David Essex, PCWorld   

But consumers will benefit from lower prices and the wider availability of CD-RW and DVD-ROM, according to industry observers.

Rewriting DVD History

A read-only DVD's standard capacity of 4.7GB is clearly superior to the 650MB of a CD-ROM, making DVD-ROM an increasingly popular option, especially on high-end PCs. But two incompatible versions of rewritable DVD, DVD-RAM and DVD+RW, are in an ongoing competition.

Last month, DVD-RAM leapfrogged DVD+RW's 3GB capacity with Hitachi's announcement of a 4.7GB drive it says will ship by January. Other DVD-RAM vendors such as Panasonic and Toshiba are expected to sell 4.7GB DVD-RAMs in early 2000, with 4.7GB DVD+RW likely to come much later.

"You will see, finally, the vendors of that club coming out with 4.7GB drives," predicts Jim Porter, president of the market-research firm DISK/TREND. "Frankly, DVD+RW's been mostly a paper tiger. It's been late, and there's been very little hardware."

But 4.7GB DVD-RAM will be too pricey for all but high-end home PCs and corporate systems. "The price points are still very high, which won't give it mass-market acceptance," says Mary Craig, principal analyst at Dataquest.

CD-RW sales will continue to outstrip rewritable DVDs by at least 3 to 1 through 2002, according to DISK/TREND.

Steady Speed for CD-ROM

On the read-only side, CD-ROMs will hold sway in the near future. But drive makers won't bother adding more numbers to the notorious "X" speeds of CD-ROMs, which now top out around 50X. And as prices slowly drop, DVD-ROMs will soon be affordable alternatives to CD-ROMs. Most software can't take advantage of the faster disc rotations anyway, Porter says.

DVD-ROMs themselves will probably level off at their current "sweet spot" of 6X or 8X.

Patrick Griffin, marketing manager for Compaq's Presario line of PCs, agrees that DVD-ROM will quickly take over, with CD-ROMs appearing on only the cheapest systems. Common in 2000, Griffin says, will be "dual optical" configurations--CD-ROM/CD-RW and DVD-ROM/CD-RW combinations. (Why two types of CD drives? To record music from one to the other.) Griffin expects CD-RW to see jumps in rotational speeds in the next year.

Hybrid Happiness

Combo drives also are in the works; Toshiba demonstrated a combined CD-RW/DVD-ROM drive at Comdex.

Craig looks further to a day when optical drives will be the most popular removable medium, displacing magnetic alternatives.

"CD-RW and its follow-on combination CD-RW/DVD-ROM product will be the dominant high-capacity, rewritable, removable storage device in PCs by the middle of the next decade, to be succeeded ultimately by rewritable DVD," she says. "Optical's going to win."