A Burning Desire Got your heart set on upgrading your CD burner? Check out the latest drives before you buy.

Whether you're dealing with one desktop or 100, a CD burneris a desirable piece of hardware capable of tackling many tasks. Ifyou have any earlier generation burners hanging around, now is anaffordable time to up-grade to the latest and greatest. Fastburning speeds let your employees spend their time on tasks moreimportant than waiting for a disc to finish recording. We'remostly going to scope out CD burners that also allow you to viewDVDs, and we've thrown in a few DVD-burning drives, just forgood measure.

The first question you're likely to face is "Internalor external?" Internal drives are cheaper and require somebasic computer knowledge to install. External drives can betransferred from computer to computer as needed for backup orpresentation use. If you need the portability so one drive canhandle the occasional tasks of a group of workers, go external. Ifnot, internal drives cost less, save space and slide easily intoany empty 5 1/4-inch drive bay. At $99 (all prices street), theinternal CenDyne CD-RW/DVD-ROM drive shows just how affordable anupgrade can be.

Entrepreneurs on the go, looking to expand the capabilities oftheir laptop computers, can turn to the $279 Addonics drive,otherwise known by its lengthy model number, AEMDVRW48XUM. Justcall it the Addonics Mobile DVD/CDRW with USB 2.0 interface.It's also available with a PCMCIA or Firewire interface for afew dollars more. You'll pay for the portability, but DVDviewing and data backup are nice options for hard-traveling mobilewarriors.

We took the $129 Samsung SM-348 out for a quick test drive. Andwe do mean quick--the 48x CD-R smoked the pokey speeds of our old4x burner. But don't expect things to get too much faster;CD-Rs will pretty much max out at 52x soon.

Faster speeds can mean a greater chance of errors, buthigh-quality media can reduce the likelihood of mistakes. We burnedseveral different kinds of data files and didn't find anyproblems. The CD-RW speeds on all the drives in our chart areslower, but CD-RWs are great for automatically backing up data.

DVD recorders are in a funny place right now. Several differentformats are duking it out for space in the marketplace, but nobodyhas really dominated yet. Analysts are expecting a shakeout to takeplace eventually that will boost one or the other toking-of-the-hill status. Confusingly, the two leading technologieshave some very close names: DVD+RW/R and DVD-RW/R. And yet anotherformat geared for backing up your data and not playing on DVD-ROMdrives is DVD-RAM. A multiformat drive like the $349 Sony DRU-500AXmakes this mess a moot point for the time being, since it handlesboth DVD-RW/R and DVD+RW/R.

The biggest attraction of burning your own DVDs is the hefty4.7GB of information that can fit on one disc. This is great forbacking up large amounts of data and creating multimedia materialsthat just about anybody can view. Just keep in mind that older DVDplayers may have trouble dealing with the rewritable format discs.We tried installing the $249 Toshiba SD-R5002 kit with DVD-R andDVD-RW capabilities. Getting it hooked up and running wasstraightforward, but getting acquainted with the software takes alittle time. Those new to DVD burning will find a bit of a learningcurve ahead of them with any drive.

For a quick and inexpensive data solution, today's crop ofCD-R/CD-RW drives is hard to beat. The technology iswell-established and won't land you in the midst of any formatwars. But if that tantalizing amount of DVD disc space and theability to make training videos or promotional materials is toogood to pass up, the outlay of an extra couple hundred dollars isworthwhile.

ShoppingList
Can your business get by with a basic CD-R/CD-RW burner, or do youwant to go all out? Before you commit, take these models for a testdrive.