Continued:

Speeds:

As with CD Writers, the rewriting speed is less than writing speeds, which pretty much match the read speeds.

For a single layer disk, the maximum speed you can achieve is 16x and the minimum is of course 1x. The "x" in DVDs is different from that of CDs where it stands for 125Kbps. For practical purposes, 4x DVD write speed equals to 36x CD write speed.

For DL media, the maximum speed available is 4x so if you want to write a full disc it will take you around half an hour.

Bundled Software:

Apart from racking your brains over the format you want to go with, you should also check the software bundled along with the drive because if you decide to go for a drive other than DVD-RAM then you will have to install a third party software to write your DVDs. If this software is not bundled then you will need to buy it and they are not all that inexpensive.

Most drives come with Nero and this software is more or less adequate for pretty much everything you might want to do with the drive.

Which One Should You Buy?

The choice is quite obvious depending on your needs. If you want to create frequent backups and don’t really want to cut home videos to distribute amongst friends, DVD-RAM would be an ideal solution as it would lead to significant cost saving in terms of media, since it can be rewritten a 100 times more than the other formats.

The other benefit will be the lack of need for third party software and the ease of backup, a simple drag and drop!

If on the other hand you want to burn and share videos, photos etc. with your friends and family then go in for a DVD drive that supports all formats. This will ensure that no matter what format is supported by your friends drive, you will be able to burn the disc in that format and share the stuff.

Also, you should buy a DVD writer that can write at really slow speeds of 1x as quite a few older DVD players have trouble reading DVDs written at faster speeds.