Hewlett Packard DVD100I

DVD+RW, or +RW as it's also known, has been a long time coming since it was first announced in 1996, but its advocates are trying to convince us it was well worth the wait.

This unit is manufactured by Ricoh. Unfortunately, its software bundle is nothing to write home about, which is particularly disappointing since the company provides excellent software with its CD-RW drives.

What you do get from Hewlett Packard is a copy of Sonic's MyDVD, and DLA packet writing software. This allows drag and drop functionality for both DVD+RW and CD-RW media.

There's also HP Recordnow, which the manual says is for creating or copying CDs and DVDs, but the application says it should only be used with CD-R media. We did try copying a DVD using this software but it crashed halfway through and rendered the disc unreadable.

HP Simple Backup does just what it says and adds some value to the bundle. Finally, you get a copy of Cyberlink's excellent PowerDVD for watching DVD movies.

Copying a DVD caused us the most problems. After HP's software crashed, we turned to the tried and tested Prassi PrimoDVD, but the software did not recognise the drive as a DVD writer.

So it would appear that DVD-R is still the medium to use if you want ultimate compatibility, but neither of these drives support it.

We should be seeing DVD+R discs appearing shortly, but we don't know if they will share the same compatibility as DVD-R. That said, it's a bit of a moot point since these drives don't support DVD+R either.

Packet writing performance was nothing short of staggering. We dragged and dropped 3.9Gb of data to DVD+RW and got results of around 21 minutes from both drives.

To appreciate just how fast that is it's worth noting that the Panasonic DVDRam drive took 58 minutes to perform the same test and the Pioneer DVD-RW unit took two hours 23 minutes.

We were also amazed that it took just over a minute to format a DVD+RW disc compared with the one hour and 49 minutes it took to format a DVD-RW disc on the Pioneer drive.

Like the Pioneer DVD-RW unit, both these DVD+RW drives also burn CD-R and CD-RW media, and it's here that the Ricoh pulled ahead of its sibling.

Burning 227Mb of mixed files to CD-R took four minutes seven seconds on the HP machine. Likewise, burning a 505Mb VideoCD took eight minutes and nine seconds.

It managed to format a CD-RW in around 11 minutes and copy the 227Mb of mixed files in about three and a half minutes. With results like this you're getting a good CD-RW drive as well as a DVD+RW unit.

Contact: Hewlett Packard 08705 474 747 www.hp.com/uk/storage