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Wait no more: Today's CD-Rewritable drives are faster than ever before, and are excellent tools for saving data and music to CD media. The most recent generation of CD-RW drives--rated at 24X for writing to a CD-Recordable disc--improve markedly on their 8X-rated predecessors, taking less than half as much time to fill a CD-R disc with data.

As speeds increase and as drive technology progresses, users are recognizing the versatility of this Swiss Army Knife of storage. Market research firm IDC predicts shipments of more than 53 million CD-RW drives worldwide this year. And IDC expects that number to grow by 35 percent to 81 million in the next year.

According to IDC, CD-RW drives are most popular for saving data, digital images, and video, as well as for recording audio CDs. CD-RW drives are also handy for copying CD-ROMs and for creating disaster-recovery discs so you can reboot and restore your hard disk drive.

CD-R and CD-RW have distinct advantages over other formats: Write-once CD-R and multiple-write CD-RW discs--both of which are available in 650MB or 700MB capacities--hold far more data than either 240MB SuperDisks or 250MB Iomega Zip disks can. And the media is sturdier and more reliable than removable cartridges such as Iomega's 2GB Jaz and Castlewood's 5.7GB Orb.

But CD media's real ace in the hole is its compatibility: CD-R discs can be read by almost all of the installed base of 600 million CD-ROM drives worldwide, as well as by most current home audio and DVD players. CD-RW discs are less compatible with commercial audio-CD players and older CD-ROM drives than CD-R discs are. On the other hand, CD-RW media has one big advantage: You can write (and rewrite) to a disc up to 1000 times.

Speed Jump

Not surprisingly, the near ubiquity of drives that can read CD media means that CD-R and CD-RW are fast becoming the de facto floppy disk replacement. And with such a huge market at stake, it's no wonder that manufacturers continue to raise the bar for performance. Our number two drive (and second Best Buy), TDK's 24/10/40 VeloCD ReWriter, writes rings around our March 2000 roundup's Best Buy, Hewlett-Packard's 8X/4X/32X CD-Writer Plus 9110i. TDK's 24/10/40--an internal drive, as are the other drives reviewed here--has a vendor-rated speed three times that of last year's HP at CD-R burning, and it's more than twice as fast at CD-RW recording. Though older, slower drives like the CD-Writer Plus 9110i are available at bargain prices, faster models have long since overshadowed them.

The three slowest drives to make our chart this time have rated speeds of 12X/8X/32X; five others are rated at 16X/10X/40X; and the remaining drives are our two Best Buys--TDK's 24X/10X/40X model and Yamaha's top-ranked 20X/10X/40X drive, the LightSpeed CRW2200EZ.

You may pay a little extra for faster performance, but CD-RW drives are more affordable than ever. Tight competition among manufacturers, coupled with the sluggish economy, is pushing prices lower and lower. Industry experts expect that by this fall we'll see 12X (CD-R rating) drives priced under $100, 16X drives at $149, and 24X drives at about $200. This price war provides a great buying opportunity because eventually--perhaps by the end of the year--supply will level off and prices will creep back up, experts say. But even if prices stabilize, they may not stay that way for long: New technologies are just around the corner (see " Storage: Taking Capacity Up, Up, and Away").

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