Record both DVD-Rs and CD-Rs
on the same drive
by Rick Smith (April 24, 2001)
If recordable CD-ROMs don't have enough capacity for you, Pioneer has a recordable DVD drive that also can record CDs as well. The Pioneer model DVR-A03 is a combination of a recordable DVD drive and a recordable/rewritable CD drive in one. This is the world's first drive that can perform all these functions in a single drive.
The DVR-A03 will ship by the end of May 2001 and will have a suggested price of $995. Now you can store a whopping 4.7 gigabytes of data on a single, removable media -- that's over seven conventional CDs in storage capacity.
Software included to make the most out of this multifunction drive is:
Prassi's PrimoDVD 2.0 for recording data to DVD and CD media
Sonic Solutions' MyDVD for DVD-Video authoring
CyberLink's PowerDVD 3.0 software DVD player
This drive is primarily targeted for digital video recording and data archiving applications, but I can see some avid digital photographers using this drive as well. Kodak's latest six megapixel camera and sixteen megapixel DCS Pro Back makes conventional CD-ROM capacities look puny.
This drive reads and writes four recordable formats:
DVD-R (Write once and is compatible with most DVD Video players and DVD-ROM drives)
DVD-RW (DVD re-recordable -- erase and re-record your own DVD discs more than 1,000 times)
CD-R (CD write once)
CD-RW (CD rewritable)
It is capable of recording DVD-R discs at twice normal speed -- the other key speeds for the DVR-A03 drive are:
2X DVD-R record 1X DVD-RW record 8X for CD-R record4X for CD-RW record4X DVD-ROM read24X CD-ROM read
In case this drive sounds familiar, Reviews OnLine covered the OEM version of the drive, before it even had a part number. That drive (now numbered DVR-103) is currently available in the Compaq Presario 7000 and PowerMac G4 systems. Now it is available to anyone by the end of May 2001 for under a thousand dollars.
Copyright
© 2006 Rick Smith All rights reserved.
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