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After years of delays, DVD-RAM is finally hitting the market. Creative Labs shipped the first upgrade kit last year; now kits from LaCie and HiVal (both based on Panasonic's LF-D101 drive) and Hitachi's OEM-only GF-1050 drive are available.
The good news is that for about $500 to $800, you can buy a DVD- RAM drive that is fast enough to copy 315MB of data in about 12 minutes. These drives are flexible, too: They read and write DVD-RAM discs (as large as 5.2GB), and can read CD-ROM, CD-R, CD-RW, and DVD- ROM discs.
Unfortunately, the good news is tempered by a slew of gotchas. In testing the LaCie DVD-RAM External SCSI kit and the Hitachi drive, we encountered three disadvantages to upgrading to DVD-RAM. First, DVD- RAM kits could be hard to find for some time. Second, these kits may not include all the hardware you need. Third, and most significant, DVD-RAM drives exist for now on a virtual island, since the discs these drives create can only be read by other DVD-RAM drives and a few newer DVD-ROM drives. The DVD-ROM drives most people have in their PCs today won't be able to read DVD-RAM discs at all. Moreover, DVD-RAM drives can't create discs in CD-ROM, CD-R, or CD-RW formats, so you can't share archived data with anyone who relies on them.
Faster Than CD-RW
The new DVD-RAM drives are certainly fast. To measure recording speed, we copied 315MB of multimedia files and programs from the hard drive of a Dell Dimension 333c PC to each DVD-RAM drive. The results: The Panasonic LF-D101...