Burn baby burn

With no sign of the end of the format war coming to pass anytime soon, prices continue to fall and we've got the latest models to take a look at.

Solid state storage such as hard disk drives have been instrumental in the development of the PC, with the median size now sitting comfortably around the 80GB mark. When it comes to portability and format compatibility between machines, you'd be hard pressed to find anything better than CD and DVD optical storage for their cost to size ratio.

When we conducted our DVD burner Labs in November last year, a section of the burners were single format writers, meaning they had allegiance to either the DVD forum's 'minus' and DVD-RAM standards or the competing DVD+R/RW format. While neither has become the outright winner both offer unique reasons for choosing them. DVD+R's strength is in its partial disc re-writing, faster re-write speed and Dual layer (DVD+DV9) support. Minus on the other hand continues to be a more widely supported form of media in home set-top consumer DVD players and DVD-ROMs, providing support for roughly 90 percent of the players available.

A year is a long time in PC hardware and the big move this year is to Dual layer writers, taking the 4.7GB storage ceiling and making it almost double at 8.5GB. While the massive storage of Blu-Ray is a still a way off yet, businesses and home users now have viable bulk optical storage for as little as $299, the same price as our single-format Labs winner only 12 months ago.

For those on a budget but still in need of some additional storage space, we've also taken five of the hottest 52-speed burners and burned a stack of CDs to show you who has the real goods when it comes to DVD's little brother. CD burning is still a fantastic method of personal backup, file archiving and portable storage without needing third party drivers as you would with USB flash storage or a portable hard disk drive enclosure.

While there may never be standardisation in a single medium or format, we've got you covered for whichever path you take, be it the well-worn or the one less travelled.