At present there are three incompatible formats for recording data on DVD discs: DVD-RAM offered by Matsushita, DVD-RW developed by Pioneer, which is the most popular recording standard, and DVD+RW, the youngest format which has some advantages over DVD-RW but is still not widespread among disc drive makers. One advantage of DVD+R/RW discs is that they are compatible with most consumer DVD players and DVD-ROM drives, and suit both the storage of data and recording of video.

Ricoh's MP5120A is one of the first DVD+RW drives to be released and is rebadged by a number of companies including Sony and Aopen. It is a high-speed drive, albeit an expensive one. It differs from its clones by offering an impressive range of bundled software.

Although the MP5120A supports two CD writing formats - CD-R and CD-RW - it doesn't support any write-once DVD formats, which is a pity as write-once discs will almost certainly remain cheaper than rewritables, regardless of how far media prices drop.

Performance-wise the MP5120A has DVD write and read speeds of 2.4-speed (22-speed CD equivalent) and 8-speed respectively, with a CD write, rewrite and read specification of 12/10/32-speed. It has a 2MB data buffer, 140ms access time for DVD and 120ms average access time for CD. It also offers inherent buffer underrun prevention, lossless linking and quick formatting capability. These help to ensure that you don't waste time and discs up when burning your data.

Ricoh bundles an impressive array of software with the MP5120A for both video encoding and general data backup. Most of the video utilities are provided by InterVideo; you get v3.1 of the WinDVD software DVD player, plus WinCoder, an MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 encoder. The latter has an interface much like WinDVD's but it allows AVI files to be selected in a batch and encoded to SVCD and DVD-compliant MPEG-2 or VCD-compliant MPEG-1. There's also WinProducer, a simple video editing program for DV and MPEG files.

For data backup there are two BHA utilities; B's Recorder Gold which looks very much like EasyCD, and B's Clip, a packet-writing program that allows DVD+RW and CD-RW discs to be used in the same way as floppy discs after the disc is formatted. This isn't much of a problem as the DVD+RW drive only takes a couple of minutes to do the formatting. After that, files can be dragged and dropped in Windows Explorer, as with any other random access drive.

Writing is speedy too; a single-file 1.6GByte transfer to DVD+RW took only nine minutes to complete, while a 600MByte transfer (also a single file) to CD-R took six minutes.

As Ricoh's MP5120A is one of the first DVD+RW drives to be released it may to easier to find than any of the others now, but it is rather expensive. However, if you need any of the authoring and encoding tools bundled with it may justify the cost.