Panasonic LF-D021

The LF-D201 DVDRam drive ups speed and capacity, and will quickly make itself indispensable.

A couple of years ago Panasonic released the first DVDRam drive on to the market and redefined PC removable storage in the process. The most amazing aspect of the drive was the cost of the media, with a 5.2Gb double-sided disc costing less than £25. This gave data-heavy users an affordable way to protect and transport their files, while the 30-year lifetime of the discs meant that the data was safe even after a significant storage time.

Now DVDRam has become an even more attractive medium with the release of the LF-D201 drive. This latest unit from Panasonic has increased the disc capacity from 2.6Gb per side to 4.7Gb per side. Anyone who knows anything about DVD will realise that this means a DVDRam disc can now hold the same amount of data per side as a single-layer DVD-Video or DVDRom disc. This brings DVDRam into a completely new market, where the media can be used for pre-mastering DVD discs, thus cutting out the need for expensive DVD-R or DLT (digital linear tape) solutions. Of course, this does depend on DVDRam being accepted by the mastering industry, otherwise you could find yourself having to transfer the data on to DLT anyway.

The drive itself is a standard 5.25in device that resembles a DVDRom drive. One disappointment is the loss of the loading mechanism employed by the 2.6Gb drive where the media was inserted between two arms that extended from the chassis. Instead, pressing the eject button results in the appearance of a standard tray that accepts both caddied and empty media.

The front of the unit is fairly bare with only an eject button, indicator light, headphone jack and volume wheel. Like the previous drive, the retail package comes with a SCSI interface, although there will be an OEM Atapi drive available. At the rear you'll find a power socket, SCSI connector, SCSI id jumpers and an audio-out port.

The drive is completely compatible with existing 2.6Gb per side media as well as the new 4.7Gb per side discs. Unfortunately, the 4.7Gb discs cannot be read or written to by the older drives, but that's pretty much par for the course when a product line is upgraded.

The LF-D201 ships with a driver disc and a suite of application software. The driver includes a format utility and a set of tools. The discs can be formatted using FAT16, FAT32, UDF1.5 and UDF2.0. Using a FAT format is the quickest option, but it will reduce the capacity to 4.3Gb on a 4.7Gb disc.

Also, using UDF (Universal Disc Format) will allow the disc to be read by Windows 9x, NT or Mac OS systems. On the application front you get an Mpeg1 encoder and an Mpeg-editing program to cut your own movies. Also thrown in is a backup utility and a program to facilitate the copying of DVDRam discs, even if you don't have enough room on your hard disk to copy all the data from the source media.

As with the previous discs, the double-sided 9.4Gb variants are sealed in the caddy, but the single-sided 4.7Gb versions can be removed. However, the LF-D201 has the ability to write to a bare disc as well as read from it and to capitalise on this feature you can also buy single-sided media in a standard jewel case without a caddy. In our tests there seemed to be no performance difference between writing to a bare disc or one in a caddy.

Put to the test
We tested the LF-D201 against its older 2.6Gb sibling and the performance gains exhibited by the new unit are significant. Copying a 337Mb file to a 2.6Gb disc on the old drive took 13 minutes 11 seconds, compared with five minutes 14 seconds on the LF-D201 with 4.7Gb media. We also copied a 94Mb folder with a mixture of files, this took six minutes 38 seconds on the old drive and only two minutes eight seconds on the new one.

Reading the 337Mb file and the 94Mb folder from the old 2.6GB drive took four minutes two seconds, and one minute 43 seconds respectively. On the LF-D201 the same operations took two minutes five seconds and 30 seconds flat. Obviously Panasonic has worked hard to improve the performance of the new drive, although the increased areal density of the new media also helps.

Panasonic sees DVDRam as the way forward for rewritable media and, having had a look at its DVDRam consumer video recorder, we have to admit that it's a compelling argument. Add to this the fact that within a few months most DVDRom drives will be able to read this new DVDRam media and the LF-D201 looks even more attractive. It's also worth considering that the LF-D201 only costs £374.82 inc VAT and a 9.4Gb disc will only set you back £34.99.

This is a great product for anyone who needs to store large amounts of data offline, or anyone who needs to transport very large files. For a professional photographer who's going digital, a device such as this will be a godsend. If the rest of the industry follows Panasonic's lead, we may have a rewritable media that can be used in your PC, your living room and every other area of your life.