Expert: Derik Hinz - 1/26/2005

Question
I have an IBM desktop computer with a CD-RW drive. Can I (or have someone) take out my CD-RW drive and put in a DVD-RW drive and still use my old CDR-RW disks on this DVD-RW drive? I can get 720 MB on my CD-RW disk. How many MB of space can I get on a DVD-RW disk? Thank you very much.

Answer
Hi Al;

Yes!

Adding a new DVD-RW is very easy and 16X DL DVD-RW drives are currently dirt cheap at about $70 online.  A standard DVD+R disk holds an incredible 4.7GB of data and the new DL disk max at roughly 9GB.

All DVD-RW drives are backward compatible with CD, CD-R and CD-RW media.  The only confusion you might encounter is that their are two standards for drives right now (+) and (-).  (+) is the MS standard and (-) is the recording industry standard.  To cut confusion, I will simply tell you to make sure you get (+) since it is the most common.

Installing the drive should be very easy - assuming your case allows easy access.  You should have to remove 2-4 small screws on each side of the drive, unplug a power cable and an IDE (data) cable.  On the back of your old drive will be a smaller "jumper" plug that marks the drive as either: Master, Slave or CS.  Make sure you have the jumper on the same setting on your new drive.  Reverse the proceedure you used to remove the old drive and your new drive should go in smoothly!

Best of luck!

-D