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From...
Verbatim to ship first 4X CD-RW drive
High-speed drive is said to format a 650MB disc in less than 30 seconds.
November 13, 1998
Web posted at: 2:04 PM ET
by Stan Miastkowski
(IDG) -- While a standards battle keeps the long-promised DVD revolution on hold, manufacturers are upping the ante on CD-Rewritable drives with faster, more versatile, feature-filled models.
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Next week at Comdex, Verbatim will roll out the 4420, which the company claims is the first CD-RW drive that offers 4X write on both CD-R and CD-RW media. (Current drives are limited to 2X write speeds for CD-RW.) The drive reads CD-ROMs, CD-R, and CD-RW media at 20X.
According to a Verbatim spokesperson, the 4420, which is manufactured by Mitsubishi, will also offer significantly faster formatting of CD-RW media using a new "fixed packet format." Existing CD-RW drives can take an hour or longer to format a CD-RW to receive data, although some allow you to write data to a disc almost immediately while the format continues in the background. But Verbatim claims the 4420 will completely format a 650MB CD-RW disc in less than 30 seconds.
The 4420 will also offer "random erase technology" that lets you use a CD-RW disc just like a floppy or hard disk -- adding or deleting individual files at any time. Some existing CD-RW drives require that the whole CD-RW disc be erased before new data can be written to it. But random erase is becoming more common, and is, for example, available in the current generation of Hewlett-Packard CD-RW drives.
The 4420 will be available in early December in an internal EIDE version. The street price is expected to be in the $400 range, comparable to current 2X CD-RW drives. The drive will include packet writing software for CD-RW and Cequadrat JustBurn for creating data and audio CDs. Verbatim will also introduce new 4X-certified CD-RW media at Comdex. Pricing for the media is not yet available.