From...

November 5, 1999
Web posted at: 9:08 a.m. EST (1408 GMT)

by David Essex

(IDG) -- Two new CD-Rewritable drives debuted Monday amid growing popularity for the optical drives, which let you copy on recordable 650MB CDs and read standard CD-ROMs and audio CDs.

Plextor's PlexWriter 8/4/32, priced at $329, is the company's first CD-RW drive with the Enhanced IDE interface widely used on PCs. For years, Plextor has marketed its drives to libraries and corporations using PCs that have more expensive SCSI interfaces for high-volume CD duplication.

"If you buy a SCSI product, the end user has to go out and buy a SCSI controller card," explains Howard Wing, Plextor's vice president of sales and marketing.

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By supporting EIDE, Plextor can tap the growing market for low-cost PCs. The company is "known for [its] high quality," says Robert Katzive, vice president of the market research firm Disk/Trend. "Now you can get that commercial reliability in your own home."

The PlexWriter can record once on CD-Recordable discs at 8X speed, which is eight times the baseline CD-ROM speed of 150 kilobits per second. It records at 4X on CD-RW discs, which can be rewritten like floppy disks, and reads CD-ROM and CD-R discs at 32X.

A PC World technician who tested the drive says it performs comparably to similarly rated CD-RW products, but it's faster than average when extracting CD-Audio tracks. "It pretty much performs as advertised," says Jon Jacobi of PC World's test center.

SpeedWriter bows

Also Monday, Smart and Friendly released its $179 CD-SpeedWriter, a 4X/4X/24X drive with a slew of CD recording and data backup utilities.

"We're enabling the consumer with a full set of professional tools," says Perry Solomon, Smart and Friendly's president and chief executive officer. The tools include Adaptec's Easy CD Creator Standard Edition and Direct CD, and Powerquest's Drive Image.

Experts say CD-R is favored to record music on PCs, while CD-RW is best for data backup and swapping discs. Music is typically recorded from audio CDs placed in a separate CD-ROM drive or downloaded in MP3 format from the Internet. CD-RW discs, unlike CD-R, can't run on audio CD players; that will change next year when MP3-compatible car CD players hit the market, Solomon says.

Plextor's announcement "underlines the significance of CD-RW moving into the mainstream and becoming a viable CD-ROM replacement product," says Wolfgang Schlichting, a research manager at International Data Corporation. "Price is the only limiting factor," he adds.

Drives priced at $100 or more are considered too expensive for PC makers to use in any but high-end systems. That should change as manufacturing efficiencies and competition drive down prices. Recordable CD media now cost a small premium compared to competing formats such as Iomega's Zip, Katzive says.

Recordable CDs also suffer from incompatibilities among vendors' drives and discs, but some standards are in the works, says Mary Craig, principal analyst at Dataquest. "The delays and the confusion in the marketplace of rewritable DVDs are opening the way for CD-RW to get a foothold," Craig adds. The entry of mass-market media vendors like Teac and Mitsumi is another sign that CD-RW has arrived, she says.

All three analysts show CD-RW sales roughly doubling between 1998 and 1999; Disk/Trend reports worldwide sales growing from 6.1 million to 12.6 million drives.