At last week's PC Expo, La Cie showed off its new rewritable DVD-RAM d2 drive. The drive will support earlier ROM formats and could be a replacement for CD-ROM drives. According to MacWeek, the company plans to release two versions of the drive. The first version is due next week and will be marketed towards media professionals. A second version, with the same mechanism, will debut this autumn for the home and small business.

The initial media will be enclosed in a rectangular cartridge. The disks apparently can not be removed from the cartridges however, the company said it will offer media that can be released from its case. According to La Cie, the later media can be read in some next-generation DVD-ROM players. The disks that are to be released this fall will work in both drives. Media for the devices will come in two flavors: A single- sided 2.6 GB disk for $30 and a double-sided 5.2 GB disk for $40.

Each drive is to retail for $799 and offer sustained throughput of 1.3 mb/sec and an average seek time of 120 ms. La Cie is so confident in these products that the company said it will phase out CD-ROM products by the end of the year

((c) Mac News Wire)