HP DVD100i DVD+RW Burner Tested

An anonymous reader writes: "I'm fairly sure this is the first review of a DVD+RW drive. Looks like it fared well in testing. The only downsides to the 100i are slow DAE with audio CD's, lousy manuals, and it can't read DVD-RW (note the dash instead of the plus) discs. Still a tad expensive at 599USD though. Are you reading, Santa?" I want this as a heavy-duty *external* drive :)

Comments

Re:Comparison to Apple SuperDrive?

[martin-k]

Well, there is:

* DVD-R & DVD-RW (Pioneer/Apple)

* DVD+RW (HP, Ricoh et al.)

* DVD-RAM (Panasonic)

Ignoring DVD-RAM (it needs cartridges and is not really DVD at all), and DVD-R (there are no DVD-Rs available AFAIK, but all DVD-R recorders can also burn DVD-RWs), it boils down to deciding whether to go with DVD-RW or DVD+RW.

If I had to decide NOW, I'd choose DVD+RW for the simple fact that it can burn at 2x while DVD-RW will always be written at 1x.

Better of course to wait for a couple of months for prices to come down and speed to go up ...

-Martin

Re:Heavy Duty External?

[Jeffrey Baker]

There are plenty of advantages to an external. First: an external must by SCSI, 1394, or USB, so it won't use up one of your limited motherboard IDE ports. Second: you can swap an external between many systems -- beats having to transfer gigabytes of data over a network. Third: you can turn an external off when you aren't using it. My external CD-RW has probably been on for less than 2 days in the three years I've owned it. This will extend its life. It also saves energy. Fourth: with all external drives, you can have a pizza-box computer. If you want hard disks, cd, cd-rw, dvd, and dvd-+rw in the same case, it has to be an enormous tower.