Digital Home Thoughts: Is it Time to Upgrade Your DVD Burner?

"Blu-ray drives, which increase capacities from 8.5GB (double layer DVDs) to 25GB, are still rather expensive and fail to deliver acceptable cost per gigabyte ratios, especially when weighed against ever-falling hard drive prices. Still, there has been progress in the DVD segment, and we wanted to take a closer look."

Computer technology improves faster than greased lightning. CPUs get faster and more cores. Video cards get faster and, uh, sometimes more cores. Hard drives get bigger and faster. We are constantly upgrading, or getting new computers that are leagues faster than their brethren years ago. However, optical drives seem to get little news, with the only headline being Blu-ray drives having come out. Tom's Hardware has turned their eye to the humble DVD Burner to see if they have stagnated, or whether they have kept pace with the rest of the technology inside the magic box. My general use of DVDs are limited, since I tend towards network based storage mediums for archiving, and flash drives for transporting files. Anyone out there still use spindle after spindle of DVDs or have made the change to Blu-ray?