We received an interesting announcement from NU Technologies: on January 16, 2004, a new firmware update was published for the DVD burner DDW-081 (B360) that lets the plus burner write to minus DVDs as well. However, as NU's functional guarantee is incredibly modest, we can only recommend the update to intrepid users.

A brief test was sobering: the DDW-081 could not write to a 2x DVD-RW from Verbatim; instead it produced a passel of I/O errors. If you want to know more, check out the statement from NU; among other info, it indicates the media formats that are guaranteed to be compatible.

Modified firmware versions (known as hacks) to enable various additional features keep showing up on the Net. There are reports, for example, of users tweaking their NEC 1100A (a + burner) with firmware upgrades so that it can also burn DVD-R/RWs. But the good news doesn't apply to all devices.

The reason for the unofficial support at NU is probably its reluctance to pay additional license fees to the RDVDC . This amount to $9, according to the online magazine "Heise"; a cost that in turn is reflected in the drive price. Similar license fees for the plus standard are already due to the DVD+RW Alliance .

Is Drive Depth Becoming A Criterion?

We noticed one detail when we shot this photo of the four test candidates: MSI's drives are not as big as the burners from Gigabyte and Asus.

The size of a drive generally doesn't play a role, since the differences aren't noticeable in a tower case. But the trend towards miniaturization and optical and haptic enhancement of the traditional PC is unstoppable, which means that optical drives are being used more and more, even in the smallest PCs like mini-barebones and set-top boxes.

Here it's good to have a drive that's as compact as possible. Not only are smaller components easier to install; they also facilitate the airflow inside the case.