How to Buy a Rewritable DVD Drive

All the talk about the next wave of optical formats--Blu-ray Disc and HD DVD--might make you think that the venerable DVD-Rewritable drive is pass é . Not so fast: DVD burners, and the media you use with them, remain a vastly less expensive option for writing discs than those costly new formats. Plus, you can get superior performance from a dedicated DVD burner: The write speeds top out now at 20X.

Rewritable DVD's advantages over CD-R are long established: Single-layer DVD media lets you store up to 4.7GB on a disc, while dual-layer (also referred to as double-layer, for the DVD+R format) media lets you pack up to 8.5GB on a single disc. Like CD-RW drives, rewritable DVD drives support both write-once and rewritable media; write-once discs are best for creating movies playable on standard DVD players and for data archiving, while rewritable discs are well suited for regular file backup.

The Big Picture Formats, speeds, compatibility--which to choose? We'll introduce you to the basics of rewritable DVD drives.more

The Specs Explained Whether you're shopping for the fastest or the most economical rewritable DVD drive, use these specifications to compare the various DVD burners.more

Rewritable DVD Shopping Tips Whether you're shopping for the fastest or the most economical rewritable DVD drive, use these specifications to compare the various DVD burners.more

The Big Picture

DVD burners remain the de facto, must-have kind of optical drive. And no wonder: The average price of a drive is $70, with prices running even lower depending on where you buy the drive, and whether there are rebates or other limited-time offers.

The format wars are a distant memory now; drives typically support writing to and reading from both of the competing, incompatible disc formats--DVD-RW and DVD+RW (and their corresponding write-once variants, DVD-R and DVD+R)--and most now support DVD-RAM, as well. In the past, drives that supported the DVD-R, DVD-RW, and DVD-RAM formats were called Multi drives; nowadays, you'll typically see models dubbed Super Multi drives that support all five DVD write formats.

An increasingly common feature of DVD burners is the LightScribe Direct Disc Labeling technology. LightScribe makes it easy to create a label on the disc, using the burner's laser to etch the label into the surface of specially coated LightScribe media.

Both DVD formats burn data and video DVDs that can be read by most DVD-ROM drives and television set-top DVD players. DVD-RAM lags behind the + and - formats in that fewer players and PC drives support it; the format has always been hindered by its playback incompatibility with most DVD-ROM drives and set-top DVD players. However, DVD-RAM provides hard drive-like random access to a rewritable disc, and that makes it a handy addition to your disc-burning arsenal.

Write-once DVD: Because write-once DVD-R and DVD+R media have a highly reflective backing, they offer the best compatibility with set-top DVD players, though some players are more sensitive to a disc's reflectivity than others. Currently, the fastest write speed is 20X for recording on single-layer DVD-R and DVD+R media. Write speeds have progressed over the past year, migrating from 16X--the last spec codified by either the -R or +R camps--to 18X and 20X on the latest DVD burners. But none of the media manufacturers so far expect to release media that is rated to write at up to 20X--one of several reasons why you may see only a minimal performance boost with these newest drives.