Sony USA surprised me today with the announcement of 3 new DVD burners, 2 of which are external. Although the need for such a device isn’t as noticeable as it should be by now, in Japan, some, if not most, laptops today come with the option of a flash-based hard drive disk, which leaves the machines without room for a CD or DVD drive.

In America, flash-based hard drives are come by. Some companies already provide some machines with such drives as an option, but the market simply isn’t as big as it is in the land of the rising sun. There you can find those sort of drives being sold on the streets on casual kiosks.

The slim external drive pictured above, can record at a maximum of 8x speed, or 4x for DL DVDs. As for the other external and internal drives:

20X DVD±R, 12X DVD±R DL, 12X DVD+RW, 6X DVD-RW, and 12X DVD-RAM for data backup, as well as 48X CD-R and 32X CD-RW recording speeds.

The internal drive can be bought this month for about $70, while the other external drives, the normal and the slim one, will be available next month for $110 and $130 respectively.

I wouldn’t mind picking up the external drive pictured above, since I don’t like the turbulence that my laptop’s internal drive makes when it’s reading or recording a disk. And this is one of the slimmest and best looking external drives I’ve seen yet.

Related posts:

Blu-Ray burners surface
Samsung announces 64GB SSD Flash Disk
Next Gen iPods to be flash only?
Sony announces 21 new Vaio laptop models
Seagate announces new 1 Terabyte hard drive disk

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