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CD or DVD?

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PCQ Bureau
New Update

Today, the CD-ROM drive is a necessity

rather than an avoidable luxury. The ever increasing

number of installable software and CD-titles coming only

on CD-ROMs, takes the luxury of treating this drive as an

optional device out of the hands of home users. Whereas

to have or not to have a CD-ROM drive is still a question

faced by corporate decision-makers.

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At the workplace, the

option of not having a CD-ROM drive on every machine

still exists, thanks to the ability to share a CD-ROM

drive across machines on a network. Also, CD-servers can

be setup on the network to make CD-ROM drives centrally

available. Remember here that we are talking only of the

CD-ROM drive, and not of sound cards, which are normally

bundled with a CD-ROM drive to form a multimedia kit. At

approximately four thousand rupees a CD-ROM drive, if you

are buying a hundred machines the cost of CD-ROM drives

alone will be four lakh rupees (about seven percent of

the total cost of the systems)! Under such circumstances,

it might be a better idea to go for smaller number of

systems with CD-ROM drives and make them shareable across

workgroups, or to have CD-servers.

In the beginning we

mentioned that the home user (read standalone machine)

does not have a choice on whether to go in for a CD-ROM

drive or not. Well, we were not exactly correct. The home

user has a choice between a CD-ROM and a DVD-ROM drive.

DVD-ROMs offer much higher capacities than CD-ROMs (up to

17 GB as against up to 748 MB of CD-ROMs). Also, DVD-ROMs

come with MPEG playback support, like Creative PC-DVD

Encore Dxr2 and Diamond maximum DVD kit which offer

MPEG-1and MPEG-2 playback, Dolby Digital audio playback

if you have amplifier or receiver with Dolby support, and

TV output.

The negative side is that there are no fixed

standards for DVD as of now. Competing vendors are trying

to push their respective stances as the standard.

Meanwhile, there have also been announcements about

DVD-ROMs, DVD-RAM, and DVD-ReWritables. This lack of

common standard and simultaneous push in various

directions has been the reason for DVD-ROM not becoming

as popular as CD-ROM. But either way, DVD is the great

white hope of future for storage devices.

The CD-ROM drive meanwhile

has come a long way to the current speed of 32x. But the

biggest barrier for CD-ROM has been its capacity. 700+ MB

at one time was considered a luxury, but today, many

software come in packs of six or even more CD-ROMs.

CorelDRAW, for example, ships with four CD-ROMs since its

version 7.

Either a CD-ROM or a

DVD-ROM is a must have for your network or home PC. You

have the choice of either waiting for the DVD-ROM scene

to get clearer and meanwhile going in for a CD-ROM drive,

or to opt for a DVD-ROM drive right away.

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