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Up until now, if you wanted a drive capable of writing CD-Recordable at the fastest possible speeds, you had to go the SCSI route; there simply were no IDE-based CD-Rewritable drives available that could burn CD-Rs at anything above 8X. But thanks to Hewlett-Packard's CD-Writer Plus 9310i, you can now jump up a notch and write CD-Rs at 10X with an IDE drive.

The 9310i wrote our 430MB test image to disc in 5 minutes, 51 seconds. Clearly faster than the existing generation of 8X drives, that speedy result came within a minute of the existing CD-R write record, which is held by Smart and Friendly's SCSI-based 12X drive, the CD Rocket Mach 12. (Although we saw some fast record times from the CD Rocket Mach 12, its overall performance proved inconsistent in our tests, and it didn't make our chart.) At $299, the 9310i is a bit pricey, but its excellent write performance and exceptionally friendly installation process helped it wrest the number-five spot away from Ricoh's 8X/4X/32X MediaMaster MP7080a on this month's chart.

The rest of the Top 5 remains undisturbed, with the affordable, $210 Plextor PlexWriter 8/4/32A leading the pack--it's our Best Buy for the fourth month running. The $249 Hewlett-Packard CD-Writer Plus 9100i remains in second place, while the $299 Sony Spressa Professional CRX140E/CH is in third, and the $229 Acer CRW-8432a stays in fourth. Sharp-eyed Web shoppers can find the Sony for as much as $50 less.

The other drives we tested this month failed to make an impact on the chart. LG Electronics' 8X/4X/32X drive, the $220 CED-8080B, offers affordability and showed steady all-around performance, but its chart aspirations were thwarted by abysmal performance in our CD-RW overwrite test. We also tested AOpen's $199 6X/4X/24X CRW9624--a solid drive that didn't provide enough of a price advantage to outweigh its performance disadvantages.

Faster, Faster, Faster

If you're a CD-RW addict with a craving for quicker write speeds, your fix is on the way. After being stuck at 4X (600KB per second) for well over a year now, CD-RW write speeds are about to jump to 8X and beyond. The first kid on the block is Yamaha's CRW8824 series of 8X CD-R, 8X CD-RW, 24X CD read drives; the drives will be available with IDE, SCSI, and FireWire interfaces. Meanwhile, Ricoh made a recent announcement of drives and media capable of supporting 10X CD-RW write speeds, but the company hasn't provided specifics or model numbers. To achieve these faster CD-RW writes, correspondingly fast media will be required, and initial indications are that the media may not be usable in current drives. Downloadable firmware upgrades may be available for some--but not all--existing products. Of course, there will be no point in using the faster media with today's drives, because it won't enhance their performance and will be more expensive. The drives are also expected to be pricey when they hit the streets later this summer, but the boost in speed will make it worth it for many people.

Is Bigger Going to Be Better?

Many users wrote us and asked which is the faster writer--DVD-RAM, which uses capacious 2.6GB-per-side media, or CD-RW? The truth is, despite an advertised 1.385MB transfer rate (in excess of 8X in CD terms), actual DVD-RAM write performance comes in at 300KB per second to 600KB per second, falling somewhere between the write performance of 2X and 4X CD-RW drives. One reason for the shortfall is DVD-RAM's hardware write verification, which double-checks each and every bit that's written. Still, even with verification turned off, the best write performance we've seen from a DVD-RAM drive is about half the advertised rate, or 700KB per second.

But DVD-RAM is about to get faster. As mentioned last month, a new generation of 4.7GB-per-side, 2X (2.77MB per second) DVD-RAM drives is expected by the end of June. Vendors acknowledge that the real-life write speed of the new drives, which are expected to be priced at around $700, will be slower than the stated 2X transfer rate. Even so, these drives should still be twice as fast as the older DVD-RAM drives--but only when the new 4.7GB-per-side media, which won't be able to be read by older DVD-RAM and DVD-ROM drives, is employed. The good news? The new media will cost the same as the older 2.6GB-per-side discs--about $12.50 per side. And the new drives should be better all-around performers.

If you're going the DVD-RAM route, you may have no choice but to wait for the new units. Every vendor we checked is out of stock of current models. Hitachi has switched production to the new drives, and Apple's G4 Macs are consuming all the first-generation drives Panasonic can produce.

We'll keep an eye on this technology and keep you posted.