MicroSolutions Backpack External DVD±RW drive

Introduction

CD's were easy to adopt. Once you bought a drive, you didn't have to worry about formats, just drive speed. Writeable CD's didn't pose any problems, either, once speeds came up to, uh, speed. DVD's are different, however. Set-top players and PC DVD-ROM drives have made the DVD incredibly popular, but the standards war that never hit CD's is still raging for their optical brethren.

In addition to standard, read-only DVD's, the enthusiast is faced with the daunting task of selecting between incompatible write formats. DVD+R is duking it out with DVD-R, and DVD+RW is at war with DVD-RW. Pick the wrong format and any one of your DVD playback devices may fail to read your disc. Even worse, the losing format could make your technology obsolete well before it outlives its usefulness.

Thankfully, the drive manufacturers have found a solution to this madness in the form of dual format writers. Sony was first, but others have followed suit in offering DVD±RW drives. What's that mean? Simply that these drives can read and write all 4 DVD write formats (+R, -R, +RW, -RW). Does the DVD player in your bedroom only read DVD-R discs? Does the kids' DVD player in your Escalade insist on DVD+R? With a dual format drive you don't have to worry about how well your players get along; DVD±RW drives let you create the right disc for each player.

With that bit of background information behind, it's time to move on to our review subject, MicroSolutions Backpack External DVD±RW drive. As the name implies, it not only burns the plethora of current formats, it's also portable. Ensconced safely in a plastic shell is NEC's ND-1300A drive with a USB 2.0 link to the outside world. Why go external? There are number of reasons for using an external drive of any type. Some PC cases lack spare drive bays, some people just aren't comfortable working inside their PC, and some need the portability that external drives offer. For example, I regularly use external drives to transport files to and from work. It's a lot easier than trying to e-mail myself data, or God forbid, using floppies. Regardless of your need, USB 2.0 and FireWire allow external drives to finally keep pace with their internal siblings. Before these specs became common, the idea of an external DVD writer was impractical, if not impossible.

MicroSolutions Backpack drive uses USB 2.0 to enable portability, hot swappability, and speed. This review will see how well it achieves these three goals.

Features & Specifications