Usually, stand-alone CD duplicators are rather large devices, using desktop-size 5.25-inch CD-ROM and CD-RW drives with a hefty mains power adapter built in. Teac's approach with this new duplicator is rather different. As you might expect ...

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 ...

Some external CD-RW drives are portable, but this one definitely isn't. It's a conventional 5.25-inch ATAPI CD-RW drive contained within a robust metal and rubber case. But what makes it particularly interesting is that it connects ...

The Odixion Uno Premium DigiCopier is a stand-alone CD copier. It consists of a 16-speed BURN-proof CD-RW drive and a Plextor UltraPlex 40-speed CD-ROM drive, housed in a metal case that has an LCD display and ...

You'd have thought that if CD-RW drives got any faster they'd take off, or at least become so noisy that it would be impossible to use them without earplugs. But manufacturers such as Plextor continue to ...

Teac's new portable USB 2.0 CD-RW drive is one of the slimmest and lightest drives that we've seen; its dimensions aren't much greater than those of a standard CD jewel case. The USB 2.0 specification means ...

Pioneer's latest DVD-ROM shows a number of improvements over previous models in the range and chief amongst these is noise reduction. This is significant, as Pioneer drives have been quite noisy in the past. The 16-speed ...

There's a lot of confusion surrounding DVD authoring, mainly because of the two competing standards. The first of these is DVD-R, for 'write-once' media that can then be used with consumer DVD players and DVD-ROM drives, ...

CD-RW drives are getting more common as their prices drop and more people realise how useful they are. With a single drive you can produce permanent and rewritable back-ups and copies of work. Although the capacity ...

There are now two different, semi-established technologies for writing to DVD. The DVD-RAM standard, which allows re-writing, can use single-sided and double-sided media. Once written, media can be write-protected, and 4.7GB discs can be used in ...

Amacom is a company that likes playing around with removable storage; witness the Flipdisk gadget. The Baby CDRW is based on the same idea - removable storage with various different interfaces - but as the name ...

It looks as if the new-generation USB specification is going to take forever to reach us, and while every one's arguing about it, the need for fast external connectivity is getting more important. Rather than waiting, ...

Ricoh's MP9060A is one of the first drives available to read DVD and CD discs, as well as being able to write CD-Rs and CD-RWs. To do this it uses two different lasers, with different wavelengths ...

Of the two drives, it's this one that's likely to find its way into desktop machines, particularly at home. This is because it uses the IDE interface, while the Mirai drive uses SCSI instead. The use ...

As you can see, this drive is a bit more expensive than the Plextor unit, and the main reason for this is the type of interface used. Where the Plextor uses IDE, this Mirai unit has ...

The ST-W1111 is Toshiba's latest DVD-RAM drive and is faster with a bigger buffer than its predecessor, the SD-W1110. The drive we tested came without a SCSI card so we connected it to our existing SCSI ...

Several years ago Panasonic produced a CD drive designed to use PD cartridges; these are almost identical to the latest DVD-RAM media but had a capacity of 650MB. Not bad at the time but small by ...

This drive stands quite literally apart from the others, as it is an external unit. If you're only using DVD-RAM with one computer then this is not much of an advantage - however, with a SCSI ...

Hitachi has produced CD and DVD drives for a while and the GF range is its latest offering in the DVD-RAM sector. It comes in two versions; the GF-1050 for connection via SCSI and the one ...

Creative has been around the sound and multimedia world for many years and, with the SoundBlaster range, established the industry standard for sound cards. Creative was amongst the first to introduce CDROM drives to the PC ...