CD and DVD Writers for the home and PC

CD & DVD Writers for the home and PC

DVD Writers take over where the CD Writer left off, the limitations of CD meant that only relatively small amounts of data could be copied at one time. Also the uptake of DVD and the improvements it offered helped bring forward the arrival of drives which can burn a DVD in under 10 minutes and still allow for the CD to be copied or read as well.

DVD Writers are the standard in new PC builds and can be purchased separately for just £15. Newer drives have been introduced which exceeds the 4.7GB limit of single sided media to allow 8.5GB to be burnt onto both layers of the disk. Newer formats are soon to be introduced which will exceed the capacity to at least 27GB.

Bluray and HD-DVD are the newer formats, Bluray can store upto 25GB on a single layer and 50GB on a dual-layer disk.
HDDVD can store upto 15Gb per layer so 30GB on dual-layer and has specifications for a triple layer which can hold 51GB. There is a format war going on as a result you must have the correct player to play the required format, however some dual format players are around if you know where to look.

At present Bluray comes with the Sony PS3 and HDDVD comes with the Microsoft XBox 360. In addition to being able to buy a standalone player of course. Films for both formats have come down around £17 from PLAY or other retailers.

DVD Writers for the home are growing in popularity and should replace the VCR at some stage. DVD Writers are included in a number of set top boxes which include a Freeview decoder alongside a hard drive. The result is the Personal Video Recorder (PVR) allows for shows to be stored on the hard drive or copied to a DVD for portability.

DVD Regions
DVD Rental

CD Writers can use either CDR or CDRW a rewritable media in the same way as DVD Writers the CDR disks can only be written or burnt once. The RW version allows for many writes or burns to be made by re-using the same disk.

CD Writers started at low speeds and are unlikely to exceed the 52x/56x speeds as the drives and media would not be able to work at higher speeds. Copying data to a CD takes just a couple of minutes and can then be used in almost all players instantly.

All burners come with built in buffers which allows you to do one or two tasks such as collecting email or writing a document, whilst writing to the disk. A buffer is similar to the anti-shock feature built into walkmans.

Speeds are written as 40 x 16 x 40 which means it has a 40x speed write, 16 x speeds re-write, and a 40x read function. The read function is exactly the same as normal CD/DVD Rom drives, the write speed is used when writing to CDs or DVD and the re-write is used only with re-writeable CD or DVD media.

IDE connection is still the most popular connection method as it is a PC standard. Other connecting options include external USB 2.0 or FireWire units.