At times it seems that drive speeds are moving along in small steps, inching along just enough so that you feel that your six month old drive is slow and ready for replacement. This is exactly what we have been experiencing in the optical drive market. Occasionally, we find that a simple firmware upgrade is all that is needed to hit the next jump in speed. A trip to the development labs of any of the major drive manufacturers would reveal some amazing drives operating at speeds much faster than we can purchase. This trickle of technology is due to economics and little else. Basically, we have to watch closely and make our purchases when the time seems right.

Choosing your next purchase is even more critical with an external drive. These self-contained USB and Firewire drives are more costly and therefore we expect them to maintain a longer service life. Now and again a new breakthrough emerges making a purchase seem justifiable. Dual Layer drives are just starting to become mainstream offerings. Packing 8.5GB of data onto one disc means that an entire uncompressed DVD video can fit on one DVD+R Dual Layer media. Backing up your hard drive using an imaging program will take ½ the DVD media to accomplish. Dual Layer really does make a compelling argument for making your next drive purchase soon.

All of this Dual Layer DVD discussion sounds rather impacting now, doesn’t it? There is only one "fly in the ointment," and that is the cost and availability of Dual Layer media. At this time, DVD+R media is hovering around $10.00 US per unit. Judging by past media releases, this should drop to approximately half of the price in a short time. No 4x DVD-R Dual Layer media was available at the time of publication, but it is expected in sometime in January. Our 2.4x DVD+R DL media purchase was made locally, so at the very least availability of dual layer media is improving.

The good news is that standard single layer DVD+R 16x media is now priced at around $2.00 US each at local stores. This enhanced speed and fairly inexpensive media makes up for the dual layer prices in our minds.

The 16x DVD+R/DVD-R writers are now taking over the high-end of the mainstream market. Prices are looking fairly descent, so what does Pioneer’s offering bring us to the market? Read on and find out…

Next