Get ready; the year 2000 is going to be the year of DVD. While the movie giants have been arguing over disc formats and various schemes to protect their distribution and source material on DVD-ROM, another format has been gaining ground, so here we're taking a look at five DVD-RAM drives that are available now and at realistic prices.

DVD-RAM is available with a capacity of 2.6GB on either side of a double-sided cartridge. There's still a disc inside but the cartridge gives some protection from sticky fingers and improves stability. Single-sided media for these drives is readily available at around £20, double-sided nearer to £30, and they use the now common Universal Disc Format (UDF). Windows 98 supports reading from UDF file structures over a range of storage devices, and utilities such as Software Architects Write DVD are usually supplied with DVD-RAM drives to prepare the media and support UDF writing. When the removable cartridge is inserted and formatted it appears to the filing system as another hard drive, and files can be read, created and deleted from any application that uses the Windows filing system. Click the 'NEXT' link below to find out more.

Company: Creative

Company: LaCie

Contact: 020 7872 8000

Company: Hitachi

Contact: 01628 585000

Company: Panasonic

Contact: 0845 600 3535

Company: Toshiba

Tags: dvd scsi optical disc drive hardware compact disc storage optical high-definition television