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The next step in optical storage is the DVD (it stands for Digital Versatile Disk) drive. These drives have been slow to gain market acceptance,largely, one supposes, because their predecessors, CD-ROM drives, continue to gain in performance. While the CD-ROM drives are revving up to as much as 40x speeds, DVD-ROM drives are literally limping along at roughly 20x, in CD-ROM terms. So DVD-ROM drives are left with only increased capacity as a reason to buy. This may be changing now as DVD-RAM is coming on the scene, making lots and lots of rewritable storage available for reasonable prices. There are some flies in the ointment there as well, however, with new standards for recordable DVD proliferating.
But OEMs are beginning to ship DVD-ROM drives in their desktop systems. Now users can get systems with high-capacity DVD-ROM storage coupled with MPEG-2 video playback, which provides a much more enjoyable home entertainment experience than was available with CD- ROM and either MPEG-1 or software MPEG. All this could spark demand for DVD-ROM drives as upgrades to existing CD-ROM-equipped machines.
There is yet one more fly in the ointment, however: The availability of DVD-ROM media, for entertainment, research and the like, isn't what it could be. But new DVD titles appear every day, so that bottleneck should be gone soon.
To see where DVD drives are in the market today, we reviewed three different kinds of DVD drive products: DVD-ROM upgrade kits from two sources for installation into desktop computers; external kits to connect to existing computers with no fuss (or very little), both DVD-ROM and DVD-RAM; and a bare DVD-ROM drive along with a bare DVD- RAM drive. The latter might appeal to a white-box builder who wants to provide customers with a DVD drive from the get-go.
We found that the products share certain characteristics. They all are CD- and CD-R compatible, so installing one into a customer's computer system will not cut him off from the legacy CD-ROMs in the market. Their performance is really quite similar; it should be, since all are rated as 2x DVD drives.
They are available with EIDE and SCSI interfaces, so that matching a drive to a computer is not a problem. It is important, however, to note...