What do you Buy: A DVD Drive or a CD Drive?
The DVD drive is slowly replacing the CD drive on the PC market. The challenge is to decide whether to invest in a DVD drive, or stick to the humble CD drive.
Listening to Music
A CD drive is fine for listening to music. Music comes on CDs, not DVD discs. There’s no dedicated DVD disc for music, as yet.
Software
Software comes on either a CD-ROM or a floppy disc. The few DVD discs that exist for software are compilations of software available on CD. In the future programs will come on DVD, but the current expense is keeping manufacturers on CD-ROMs. There’s no doubt that as software grows in size it will start arriving on DVD-ROMs, but that’s unlikely to occur within the year.
Watching Films
If for some reason you want to watch films on your computer, then you need a DVD drive. There are two methods of reading a film from a DVD, software and hardware. Software is the cheaper option and is prone to jerky playback. Hardware is the faster option and gives smoother film play, but requires a separate decoding card, adding extra cost.
Writing to a DVD disc
CD-R/RWs are becoming a feature of a lot of PCs and are falling in price. Hardware for writing to a DVD is more expensive and is frankly, a bit of a mess. A single standard has not been introduced, which gives us incompatibility and transport problems with varying expense.
A DVD-R drive can burn a DVD disc once only, which reduces the uses of such a drive unless you wish to perform a very large backup. The DVD-Ram standard allows multiple records. There is a transporting between machines problem, as only a DVD-Ram compatible drive can read from the disc. They are ideal for backing up and archiving your own data. A promising standard DVD-R/W allows for multiple recording for the future. Currently a DVD-Ram costs several hundred pound. It is likely to cost several thousand pound if you want to create your own film DVD discs.
The expense of a blank DVD disc is a consideration, currently over 10 times the price of a blank CD disc. Backing up on a CD R-R/W is a much cheaper option, even though more discs are required.
The Verdict
Stay with a CD drive for now, maybe upgrade to a DVD drive in a year or so. CD drives did cost as much as DVD drives do now. The price will eventually fall and when it does, a DVD drive is an attractive proposition. You may even save money buying a DVD drive later, and will get a faster, better drive in the process.
Pros. of a DVD:
Cons. of a DVD: