The DVD-RAM drives on test fall into three categories. If you're looking for an external unit then LaCie's is your only choice. It's on the expensive side but is well built and one of the fastest on test. For someone who wants to upgrade their existing PC without the expense of fitting an extra card or doing too much surgery inside the box, then swap out or add the Hitachi to your system. With only 512KB of cache compared to 2MB on all the other drives, it may not give you the fastest performance, but it will work fine at a reasonable cost

The third category consists of the Panasonic, Creative and Toshiba drives, and there is little to choose between them in terms of performance (although the Creative is the fastest if you include CD read speed). The Toshiba has a better method of integrating with the filing system, using just a single icon, and has the novel ability to prepare DVD-RAM discs for use in other drives. That leaves us with the Panasonic, which is well built, performs well and is compatible with earlier PD media.

We can expect to be looking at DVD-RAM drives again in the next few months, as most of the manufacturers will have new drives out with almost double the capacity. At 4.7GB per side these will be able to hold feature length movies, so watch out - home DVD video recording could be just around the corner. Some late news; new G4 Macs are now being fitted with Panasonic DVD-RAM drives as standard.