AnandTech visits Computex Taiwan spots BenQ Serial ATA drive

DamnedIfIknow used our news submit to tell us that
he spotted
this story over at AnandTech. What we may find interesting is,
they got a shot of BenQ's lineup of DVD recorders for the near future. This
includes among others, a picture of the DW1650 4x dual-layer 16x
dual-format Serial ATA drive. In addition, they were able to see some 16x DVD+R media on display from three different manufacturers. But, as DamnedIfIknow noted, no dual-layer media was to be found anywhere. Strange.

During the show, we had a chance to talk to some of Taiwan"s larger media manufacturers, including Ritek, Prodisc and CMC Magnetics. Much to our surprise, all three manufacturers had 16X DVD+R media on display. There seems to be enough expectation that 16X DVD-R media will also follow, although we did not see samples of that particular disc on the show floor. As we saw with the AOpen and BenQ drives, chipset companies like MediaTek and Ricoh are confident enough of 16X DVD-R media support to advertise it in their upcoming chipset specifications. Sanyo and Philips are expected to follow suit. However, as common as 16X media was, dual layer media seemed almost untalked about.

As we have known for some time, the battle for high capacity optical storage is about to begin. Of course, we know that there are two camps. One is the HD-DVD spec and the other is Blu-ray. We can read where some manufacturers are promising Blu-ray devices in 18 months or less. However, in the above chart, we can see some information put forward by ProDisc that casts a negative light on the Blu-ray concept.

Source: AnandTech