Originally posted by Buck_W:
Can someone tell me the primary differences between the two drives (above) and why you would choose one over the other?
When I click on those links only one is for a DVD burner, the other is for an 80GB hard drive. But I'm in a similar situation with my PowerBook at work. To save money I ordered it with a combo drive - planning to upgrade to a Superdrive at a later date. So I'm assuming you want to know the difference between the DVD Multi-drive and the standard Superdrive???
Personally, I'd go for the Multi-drive. It's as fast as the latest Superdrives (2x DVD-R, 1x DVD-RW) but adds support for the 2x DVD-RAM discs. DVD-RAM is not a good format for video because it's only supported on Panasonic DVD players and burners (VCR replacements). However, DVD-RAM is probably the best DVD format available for data backup. Reason? You don't have to write a disc or a session - just treat it as a big ass floppy disk (or zip) and drag and drop files on the fly. It's this capability that allows the Panasonic consumer decks to be the ONLY DVD recorders with time shifting (IE pause live TV). Of course hard drive based consumer decks have that capability, but only Pansonic's DVD-RAM decks can do it on DVD. And since the Multi-Drive also supports DVD-R and DVD-RW discs, you still get maximum compatibility for your video projects. It's like having the best of both worlds.
OTOH, if you want to talk about notebook hard drive performance, Hitachi and Toshibi recently released high speed (7200rpm) 9.5mm, notebook hard drives. They're smaller capacity at 60GB (Hitachi) and 50GB (Toshiba). But they're the fastest notebook drives available at the moment. Barefeats tested them a while back and it managed 40-45MB/sec on some tests - extremely impressive for a notebook drive. And it draws the same power as the 5400rpm drives so you don't give up battery life despite the performance gains. regards........joe
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