The first and possibly the only question to ask is; do you really need one of these drives? Buying one involves laying out a fair of money for something that some people may only use once or twice. If most of your archiving is done to CD, you'll be losing performance by swapping an existing fast CD-R/RW drive for one of these DVD writers.

If, on the other hand, you have a lot of home movies that you want to edit and store, or need to back up serious amounts of data, then the drives reviewed here offer some of the most cost-effective methods of doing so.

The cheapest of the drives reviewed here, the Ricoh MP5125A-DP, represents good value for money as it combines reasonable performance with a good software bundle and comes with the most media in the box. As you might expect from Plextor, the PX504A is a well built, fast drive which comes with everything you need to get started, and both the AOpen DVRW2412 Pro and the Pioneer DVR-A05 are good drives.

As stated earlier, the major problem with DVD-RAM is its lack of compatibility with standalone DVD Players and DVD-ROM drives, however it is the easiest format to use, with its built in drag-and-drop read/write support, making it great for backups. Panasonic's LF-D521E makes this format more popular due to its relatively low price and the fact that it supports the highly-compatible DVD-R and DVD-RW as well, so this is a nice all-rounder.

However, if you are unsure which format to choose, then the Sony DRU-500AX is the drive to go for, being the first of the DVD-Dual drives. It supports DVD-R/-RW and DVD+R/+RW, it's reasonably priced and the software bundle makes it hard to resist. Unless you have reason to go for one particular format, or you specifically need DVD-RAM (which only the Panasonic drive can handle), the Sony is the drive we'd recommend, because it takes away the worry about which format to choose. Like VHS and Betamax in one.