The reason? Double-density drives and disks that offer twice the capacity of today's 630MB products are coming soon.

Cirrus Logic Inc. industry market leader of CD-RW chips, promises to deliver a new double-density encoder/decoder this fall that makes it possible to store 1.3 gigabytes of data on a single CD-RW disc.

This 1.3-gigabyte capacity translates into 60 minutes of real-time video, or 144 minutes of real-time audio. The new drives also will boost read and write speeds to new levels at 48x and 16x, respectively, faster than any drives now on the market.

This means we can look for price drops as vendors clear out inventory of current drives. We might see prices of 4x4x24 drives drop close to $110-125 as vendors clear out inventory to make way for the new higher-capacity drives. That will make them tough competition for removable-cartridge drives with much less storage capacity and far higher costs per unit of storage media.

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