CD & DVD Writers

As mentioned in the previous article, CD and DVD media provides ample storage space at a very affordable cost and thus a CD or DVD drive is an essential component of your computer system. In the last article we discussed CDROM and DVDROM drives; this article focuses on their writeable counterparts: The CD-RW and and DVD-RW drives.

CD Writers

A CD-RW drive is capable of recording data to a CD which can then be read by a standard CD-ROM drive (and of course by the CD-RW drive itself) as well as by DVD-ROM or DVD-RW drives. The CD-RW drive has two different write modes for the two types of CD media: CD-R and CD-RW. The former, CD-R, can only be written once, whereas with CD-RW one has the option of rewriting the data. If you get a CD writer, make sure it's CD-RW; there exist older drives which are only capable of writing to CD-R media but the difference in cost is not enough to justify getting the older technology.

The speed of a CD-RW drive is given by three numbers; recall that with a regular CD-ROM drive we see numbers such as '40x' to describe reading speed. You will notice three sets of numbers for a CD-RW drive such as 48x/16x/48x for example. These numbers refer to CD Reading speed / CD-RW writing speed / CD-R writing speed respectively. If you don't plan on writing very many CDs you probably don't need to worry about the write speeds (although you may find that once you have a CD-RW drive and get used to using it you will end up writing more and more CDs), but you will certainly want the reading speed to be as high as possible.

DVD Writers

There are several varieties of write-capable DVD drives that can be very confusing to the average user. There are three basic types that you should be aware of: DVD-RW, DVD+RW and DVD-RAM. I won't go into the actual technical differences between the types of DVD drives here as it is quite complicated; it's sufficient to say that the various formats are supported by different companies manufacturing DVD writers. The format you will choose depends on the DVD players that will be playing your written DVDs. If you have a DVD player hooked up to your TV set, you'll want to make sure that the DVDs you produce on your DVD drive will play in that player. There are online resources that can help you decide which DVD writer to choose by showing you a breakdown of which technologies are supported by which manufacturers; you should probably make use of these resources if you are planning on buying a DVD writer. Alternatively, you could make a note of all DVD players upon which you want to play your written DVDs and ask the salesperson whether they are compatible.

As you can see, there are plenty of choices for CD and DVD drives to use on your system. We recommend getting a DVD writer (either DVD+RW or DVD-RW) capable of also writing to CD (CD-RW); this way you can make use of the new DVD technology and still be able to read and write CDs on the same drive.