Sony DVD DRU-530a

Sony announced the DRU-530a on October 20, 2003. This is a "dual RW" DVD burner, meaning it handles both competing rewritable formats: DVD-RW and DVD+RW. For its time, it offered good speed, with an 8X DVD+R speed (allowing the burning of an entire DVD+R in about ten minutes).

The DRU-530A is actually the designation for the internal version of this drive. Sony also sold an external (with both IEEE 1394 and USB 2.0 interfaces) version of the drive, designated the DRU-530UL. Both versions have a 2MB buffer.

Sony packed the retail DRU-530 with a healthy bundle of software, including: Sonic RecordNow, Sonic DLA (drive-letter access for packet writing), Sonic MyDVD (video authoring, CyberLink PowerDVD (DVD-playing software), and MUSICMATCH Jukebox (music manager).

At the time of their announcement, Sony gave an estimated retail price of $270 for the DRU-530a and $350 for DRU-530UL. As usual for optical drives in recent memories, these prices would quickly spiral downward.

See Also:

• Our main page on Sony optical drives.

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