That old CD-ROM drive in your computer may soon look as antiquated as a 5.25-inch floppy drive: Just as the old flexy floppy disappeared when faster, higher-capacity 3.5-inch disks caught on, a potential CD-ROM replacement has already spun into view. DVD-ROM drives have fallen in price and soared in performance over the past year. But they may offer more speed than you'll ever need.
Back up your hard drive, play and record audio CDs, and watch movies using the same optical drive? That scenario was pure fantasy until Ricoh released the first combination DVD-ROM/CD-Rewritable drive earlier this year (see April New Products, www.pcworld.com/apr00/ricoh_np). Now that product is getting serious competition from the Toshiba Corp. SD-R1002 Combination CD-RW/DVD-ROM Drive. We reviewed a shipping model.
The race to 1 GHz was fast and furious, but systems packing that heat have been slow to arrive on store shelves. However, 1-GHz Athlon systems are available now, and to judge from our tests, they live up to expectations. The most recent model we've examined, the $3388 Polywell Computers Inc.'s 800K7-1000, is the fastest we've seen. It posted a sizzling PC WorldBench 2000 score of 162, which is a negligible 3 points slower than our reigning WorldBench champ--a preproduction 1-GHz Intel Pentium III-based IBM Corp. Aptiva machine.
The universal Serial Bus isn't just for adding USB peripherals to your PC anymore. New USB docking stations also let you add a host of legacy ports--including serial and 10-mbps ethernet--to a single USB Connection on your PC. Belkin Components' $99 BusStation has the latest modular approach, allowing you to mix and match as many components as you need. These versatile devices reduce cable clutter and eliminate the Problem of having too few ports or IRQs--especially good news for notebook users.
Want your DVD and your CD-Rewritable, too? Until now, this meant buying two separate drives. But no more: Ricoh Co.'s $399 MediaMaster MP9060A gives you 6X/4X/24X CD-Rewritable technology and a 4X DVD-ROM player in the same drive. However, you'll pay for the space-saving combination--in both performance and price.
Zap your Zip and can your CD-ROM:
Stuck with older 66MHz motherboards and chip sets, early Pentium II adopters could not drop in faster new processors, which run on a 100MHz bus. But now there's Evergreen Technology's Performa 500 upgrade, featuring a 500MHz Celeron CPU that runs on the 66MHz bus.
Pacific Digital's US$269 PDC 448USB and Sony's $329 Spressa USB Plus 4X write/4X rewrite CD-RW drives combine the plug-and-play convenience of USB with both PC and Mac compatibility. We found them to be ideal drives to share in a small or multiplatform office. We tested a shipping version of the Sony drive, and a near-final version of the Pacific Digital model.