Sony has announced internal and external drives that sport the DVD Alliance's 8-speed DVD+R spec.
The internal drive (DRU-530A) will be available from next month for $257 ex VAT, while the external one (DRX-530UL) will be available from January at a price yet to be confirmed.
The 8-speed write specification was ratified by the Alliance in August, promising to burn DVD+R discs in less than ten minutes.
The drives only offer 8-speed performance for writing DVD+R discs: DVD+RW discs are burned at 4-speed. And although the drives support the -R format, performances with these discs are halved.
The internal drive is a half-height ATAPI (EIDE) device. The external one offers USB 2.0 and iLink (FireWire) interfaces. Both have a 2MB buffer memory.
The drives are sold with Sony's PC-only suite of applications for DVD-authoring, burning, formatting, playing and music managing.