Optical Drive
You've probably heard about the ongoing format battle between Blu-ray Disc and HD DVD, two competing (and incompatible) high-capacity blue-laser technologies. Both promise to pack far more data onto optical storage media than older technologies do--25GB or 50GB onto a single disc for existing PC-ready Blu-ray drives, and 15GB, 20GB, or 30GB for HD DVD discs when rewritable drives arrive. Dell, Philips, Pioneer, Sony, and a slew of consumer electronics makers are backing Blu-ray technology; Intel, Microsoft, and Toshiba are promoting HD DVD.
Living-room players for high-definition movies have been released in both formats, as have dozens of movie titles. But right now the only high-density drives you can get for your PC are rewritable Blu-ray. One of those will set you back a whopping $750 or so, with correspondingly expensive media as well. And until the format war is decided, any given drive has the potential to become the next Betamax. If you're a graphics artist or someone else who has heavy storage needs, this option might well be worth pursuing. Otherwise, this is one hot technology you'll want to let simmer awhile. As a hedge, some vendors are talking about making drives that can handle both formats. But none has yet announced any definite plans.
There are other alternatives for an optical drive upgrade, though, particularly if you don't already have a rewritable DVD drive installed (or if your current drive is several years old). For less than $50, you can purchase a newer optical drive capable of writing at 16X speed to 8.5GB dual-layer media. Plextor's internal PX-760A drive is relatively expensive at $100, but it's also one of the few current models that claim 18X write-once DVD speed, and it was quick to install and burn in our tests. Working with its bundled software, it took the drive 16 minutes to burn a 2.15GB movie, and less than 4 minutes to write 7.66GB of various-size data files from the hard drive.
Here's a burning tip: If you frequently back up to optical storage and you want the best bang for the byte, use plain old 4.7GB DVD-R media. At today's prices, you'll pay just 13 cents per GB, versus 22 cents per GB for dual-layer DVD+R storage. Seemingly dirt-cheap CD-Rs actually run 56 cents per GB, and 25GB Blu-ray BD-R discs cost 80 cents per GB.
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