15. Toshiba SD-H903A Half-Height Internal Player/Burner

This Toshiba HD-DVD drive scores another first: it's the first drive that can write to as well as read from single- and dual-layer HD-DVD-R discs. The drive made its debut at CES in Las Vegas in early January, 2007. Alas, the SD-H903A burns HD-DVD content painfully slowly at 1x speed, the same as 3x DVD speed, but that means it takes as long to burn or copy high-definition video on this drive as it takes to record it in the first place. The drive fits a single drive bay in a conventional desktop PC case and supports the SATA interface, along with an 8 MB cache. Other stats include DVD-RAM writes at 3X, conventional DVDs at 8x, double-layer DVDs at 2.4x.

Figure 11: The half-height SD-H903A can write HD-DVD content as well as read it.

Right now, only single layer HD-DVD media is available for burning content, so current capacity tops out at 15 GB. When dual-layer discs hit the market that number will double to 30 GB, and represents a pretty spiffy way to back up large collections of digital music or standard-def video on a single disc.

As with other Toshiba internal drives, this unit is currently available only to OEMs.