Cut Your Own CDs

Zip or Jaz drives are for wimps. For permanent portable storage you can share, you need to burn your own CDs. We took 7 recordable and 9 rewritable drives for a spin, and we also got a glimpse at the future--a huge-capacity DVD-ROM drive.

The recordable CD (CD-R) drive is a truly wonderful invention. Not only can it act as a quasi-backup device, it has two unique talents: It can make both music CDs and 650MB data CDs that anyone with a CD-ROM drive can read. Try that sometime with a Zip drive.

There's just one little problem with CD-R drives: You only have one shot at making a disc. Once recorded, a CD-R disc can't be altered. Enter rewritable CD-R drives (CD-RW), which let you erase and reuse special CD-RW discs hundreds of times.

Formerly very pricey, CD-RW drives now sell for as little as $399, almost as cheap as their CD-R siblings. Which raises the question: Are CD-R drives still worth buying?

CD-R is still in the game, but probably not for much longer. After testing seven CD-R drives and nine CD-RW drives from Hewlett-Packard, Ricoh, Sony, and other leading manufacturers, we concluded that a CD-R drive is still a good buy if you plan on churning out CDs every day. But the case for CD-RW is strong: If you don't mind the slower speed, a CD-RW drive can do everything a CD-R can, plus give you the choice of using rewritable discs.