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Should I Worry About Mt. Rainier Support?
"Now if you're not familiar with it the idea is to make it so you can use CD-RWs as floppies (same as DirectCD) only it's supports things like defect correction (instead of making the OS do that work) and eliminate formatting times. But the drive doesn't support writing to the format. Is this something that could be added in a firmware upgrade? Also, it looks like Mt. Rainier is also supposed to be for DVD+RW discs. Is this true?
Mt. Rainier drives have been on the market for a while now. It's not too common because it requires 3rd party software if the OS doesn't support it natively (I don't think it will be in Windows until Longhorn, and it looks like there are patches for the Linux kernel).
Can it be added with a firmware upgrade? Have a better drive suggestion? Can it be added with just software? Will it be a moot issue because of recordable DVD drives?"
Well, perhaps they can, but it's up to the manufacturer. For example, I have a Pioneer DVD drive that wants to read all DVDs with 16x speed. Needless to say, it's a loud drive to watch movies with. I complained to Pioneer and asked if they could release a firmware patch to slow down the drive. They replied something along the lines "it would be impossible because the hardware couldn't support it". I consider that reply as bullshit as the drive already slows down if there're scratches on the disk so they are just too lazy to support older drives. So, if there isn't firmware patch available already, I wouldn't count on it being available in the future either. YMMV.
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To answer some of your questions, yes Mount Rainier can be implemented in the firmware of many drives that dont natively support Mt Rainier. There are some prerequisites, but almost any modern drive that supports packet writing and buffer undderrun protection (ie the ability to accurately store and return to media locations) meets them. Of course it needs to write to a media whose format supports Mt Rainier. In theory any modern CDRW drive (with decent short-gap "buffer undderrun protection") could be upgraded to Mt Rainier, provided it had enough capacity in its F/W chip to store the code (most are only 1-2Mb). I'd be suprise if it were any different for DVD+. The DVD- format, for a number of reasons, is exclusive with Mt Rainier provisions for random access, defect management and background formatting - there will never be a Mt Rainier DVD-RW drive, its impossible! Mt Rainier was designed from the outstart primarily for CDRW (along with some more obscure optomag formats) and +RW was designed from the start to be compatible with Mt Rainier. Of course having said all that I'm dubious Sony will put in the effort to produce Mt Rainier firmware for an already released product, in fact I've never seen a manufacturer do that. It's correct that Longhorn has been slated by M$ to $upport Mt Rainier natively.
I agreed with all the previous posters that if a drive doesn't support Mount Rainier already, don't count on a firmware upgrade being available in the future.
Philips latest 4x DVD+RW drive DVDRW416K is the first DVD+RW drive supports Mount Rainier. Note that it was just announced at CeBit last month and it's not shipping yet.
Do consider that if Mount Rainier is important to you, alternatively you might want to consider DVD-RAM. The new Panasonic LF-D521 can read and write DVD-RAM, DVD-R/RW and CD-R/RW, and the drive can be had for $160-$199. DVD-RAM media is quite a bit more expensive than DVD-RW/+RW, and incomaptible with existing players, but for random access data storage it's far more reliable and simple. DVD-RAM has the same defect management and drag-and-drop rewriting that DVD+MRW promised, but it's here now (actually it's been around almost as long as DVD-ROM has). It's a good choice for random access data storage if it fits your need.
What I wonder is how reliable traditional (non-Mount Rainier) packet writing on DVD+RW is. Minor defects on a traditional packet-writing CD-RW can render the whole disc unreadable. I wonder if the same is true for traditional packet writing DVD+RW. Does anyone here has a solid answer to that?