Packet Writing - the real breakthrough for CDs

Many people thought CD-R was the breakthrough that CD-ROM needed to boast it's popularity in the corporate world. Although CD-R's growth has been great, users quickly discovered problems with ruined disks from buffer underruns and the high overhead (13MB -14MB per session) associated with multi-session writing.

One of the biggest areas of interest in CD jukeboxes is packet writing. Packet writing allows a CD-R to be treated just as if it was another hard drive. No more proprietary software to create a CD-R. Since packet writing turns your CD-R into another drive letter, you can use Windows 95's Explorer to drag and drop files onto your CD-R. Smart Storage's FloppyCD product allows DOS and Win 3.1, as well as Win 95 users to treat their CD's as one large floppy diskette or hard disk, whereas most other products on the market work with only Win 95.

Imagine being able to treat an inexpensive CD-R disk like a hard drive costing 100 times more? Packet writing has been available on standalone drives and single drives on a network. But the real breakthrough is applying this technology to jukeboxes on a network. Gary Brach of Smart Storage says his company will be introducing packet writing for jukeboxes in the first quarter of 1998.

Many believe that packet writing will delay the widespread use of DVD-RW for some time, particularly when DVD is still wrestling with the standards issue. Since CD-ROM and CD-R are so common today, the move to packet writing is a very small step for the end-user.

Steve Goodfellow is principle of Access Systems, Inc., an independent consultant in Knowledge Management and technology assessment. Steve can be reached at (315) 682-1188 or via e-mail.