At Comdex, TDK Electronics announced new CD-RW drives it will introduces later this year that will use multilevel recording to achieve much higher write speeds as well as larger capacity.
TDK claims that by using special media the drive will be able to write 2 gigabyte CD-Rs at 36X speed. TDK says it plans to scale the capacity up to 2.6 and then 3.2 gigabytes.
Will this fly? It might, depending on how much the drives cost. The cost-per-megabyte of the media is roughly equal to the cost of using current CD-Rs. If the drives cost roughly the same as high-end CD-RW drives, then this technology could be a viable CD-R replacement until the various rewriteable DVD efforts finally sort themselves out.
I use CD-R technology for back ups as well as archiving large multimedia files and the 650mb limit of current CD-R technology is really showing its age and the companies working on writeable DVD seem intent on delaying any real alternatives as long as possible. TDK’s drive isn’t a long term solution, but given that it may take another four or five years for cheap, standard DVD rewriters, this might be just the ticket.