Ricoh to market CD-RW hardware

Quickly adopting the new CD-Rewritable (CD-RW) media that can be re-recorded thousands of times, Ricoh (San Jose, http://www.ricoh.com) has introduced the first CD-RW-capable CD-Recordable (CD-R) drive.

Using both standard CD-R and the new CD-RW media, the MP6200S ($599) drive is the first on the market to have the rewritable capability and a SCSI-2 interface.

Used as a CD-R drive, the finished CDs are compatible with existing CD-ROM players, while recorded CD-RW media will be backward-compatible with multiread-enabled drives. Further, the media will be forward- compatible with future DVD players, making CD-RW a viable "bridge" technology.

The new recorder supports packet writing technology that allows a disc to be written in files instead of tracks