SD-L902A
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Toshiba's slim HD DVD drive for thinner HD DVD laptops
Meet Toshiba's slim HD DVD optical drive for laptops. Perhaps already spotted in Samsung's M55, the SD-L902A measures a mere 12.7-millimeters in height and integrates a blue-violet laser that can read and write to HD DVD-R, access HD DVD-ROM media and act as a multi-drive to read and write to "all types" of standard DVD and CD discs. The drive includes an 8MB buffer with recording rates of 1x to HD DVD-R, 2x to DVD-R DL, 2.4x to DVD+R, 4x to DVD±R and DVD±RW, 3x to DVD-RAM, 16x to CD-R, and 10x to CD-RW. On display starting tomorrow at CEATEC Japan and shipping in "sample quantities" by the end of the year. Good news if you've ever been saddled with Toshiba's Qosmio fatty. [Via Impress]
HD optical disc burners at Computex
Adding to the growing list of Blu-ray burners we've seen so far from Philips, Pioneer, Samsung, and BenQ is a new unit from ASUS that was being shown off at Computex. This BD-R/RE/ROM burner, whose model number remains a mystery, is capable of writing to Blu-ray discs at two times speed, while burning to standard dual-layer DVD+R and DVD-R platters is accomplished at 2.4x and 2.0x speeds, respectively. Also on display was one of the first HD-DVD-R units we've seen, the 12.7-millimeter thick SD-L902A from Toshiba, which appears to burn data at what we're hoping is just a first-gen speed of 1.0x. As with many products introduced at the Taiwanese trade show, pricing and release plans for both of these burners are still up in the air.[Via HDBeat]