Next-gen optical drives get better

TOSHIBA AND HITACHI have been showing off drives that push the next-gen, DRM-infused media formats into quite interesting territory. No, they don't remove the infection, but they do make devices that any hardware geek would be very interested in.

From Toshiba we have the a slimline laptop HD-DVD writer. Not much to say about this other than writing 15Gb+ disks is not something you can do on the road. Backups are now within the realm of possibility once again, as is cloning movies based on the undefeatable AACS.

The other drive has some serious potential for media centers, it is a combo HD and BD drive that will also write dual layer (50GB) BD disks. It will do BD-R and BD-RW as well as all the DVD and CD formats, plus, minus and RAM.

The only thing this drive will not do is HD-R and HD-RW. If you think about it, BD is much higher density, so if you are doing anything other than copying movies, you are probably better off with BD, it packs about a third more space.

The Hitachi drive has a SATA interface (Note: Yay!) and will read next gen media at 6x and write them at 4x. The only thing left to do now is invent technology that allows them to fit all the necessary logos on the front of the drive. µ