Price Guides May 2004: Optical and Magnetic Storage

DVD Burners

Now that you've bought your massive new hard drive, how are you going to back up that much data? CDs certainly won't be much fun if you have more than 1-2 gigs to back up (even with HD CD at 1.4GB a disc) and tape drives are slow dinosaurs of the past. Thankfully, DVD burners have come down in price almost where CD burners were little more than a year and a half ago. In fact, there are still some 4x DVD burners that cost *less* than a few CD burners.

Since we have all grown accustomed to blazing fast CD write times, we won't even discuss 4x DVD burners at this point, but instead jump right into 8x. With a total capacity of 4.7 gigs per disc and media prices slowly falling DVDs are finally becoming a viable medium for sending large files to friends or family and for making backups. The ability to make backups of your expensive DVD or game collection so that the kids don't scratch up the originals is worth the investment on its own merit.

Our recent DVD roundup goes into full detail on the exact performance and quality that you can expect from six different models. As you may recall, the NuTech DDW-082 won the Editor's Choice award in that roundup and certainly wins the seal of approval for its price as well. For $75 you fairly decent media compatibility, 8x DVD-/+R, 4x DVD-/+RW, and 4x DVD-/+RW (we can only dream of the day when the industry and marketplace chooses +, -, or something else to settle on) burn speeds as well as very acceptable CDR burn speeds of 40x. The media compatibility really isn't too much of an issue since most buyers tend to at least get a brand they recognize to help avoid filling your living room with 4.7GB coasters, no matter how amused guests may be. This drive can easily replace every optical drive in your system without losing any noticeable performance on CDs and while getting great DVD performance. If NuTech isn't your thing, the NEC ND-2500A/AOpen DDW8800 are also excellent drives for the price, but generally burn slower than the DDW-082.

Another interesting burner to consider is the LG GSA-4082B; simply because it's the cheapest triformat burner around. DVD-RAM isn't a particularly widely support format, but most new PC DVD drives are shipping with read support for DVD-RAM so the option is there if you need it.

And what about DVD Dual Layer that we reported on a month ago? Patience grasshopper. First samples will be showing up at review sites this week, but issues of media and software support still concern us. DVDR-9 (DVD Dual Layer) will also be considerably slower than the 8X speeds (and soon 12X speeds) on the market right now. With 8X DVDR-5 drives as cheap as they are (and falling), media practically free and software support mature, why wait?