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This is one aspect of my PC that changes more than any other, mainly because of the low price of upgrading and the speed of progress.

CD-RW -  The Yamaha drive was carried over from my previous machine, the XP1800+ mentioned above. The previous drive was a Plextor 40x10x32, this was a great drive that supported all the current sub standards, of which CD-TEXT was the one I used most. But times had moved on and I was finding the Plextor too slow at extracting audio and writing discs. I had been reading the press releases for the soon to be available CRW-F1, it offered the ability to write at 44x speed, re-write at 24x speed and extract audio at 44x speed but the real killer feature of this device was the ability to label discs - called tattooing by Yamaha - by using the laser to 'burn' shapes in any unused area at the end of a disc, the only problem was the price was expected to be high. Shortly after release Ebuyer was selling the device at around £70. It's a great drive that writes reliably and fast on all sorts of discs and supports all the sub standards that are available but the tattooing facility is pointless most of the time - if the disc is full to capacity there's no room for the tattoo and even if there is unless you're using discs that show a marked change when written (most don't) you can see the tattoo!

Left - The case built up. Yamaha CD-RW in the top slot and the Optowrite DVD-RW in the third slot. The middle slot is left empty to allow adequate cooling of the drives which become surprisingly hot in use. It's also possible to spot the 2 hard drives flanking the floppy drive. Once again this is done for cooling purposes, with modern hard drives that spin at 7200rpm or faster heat should be taken into account.

Right - In this shot it's easy to see how I've added gaffer tape to the front to force proper airflow from outside the case rather than just recycling warm around the fan. I plan to remove the metal directly in front of the fan for less restriction in the airflow. The fan used a second hand Panaflow 92mm bought for £2. The fan isn't running at full speed, this help keep the noise to sensible levels.

DVD +/-RW - The Optowrite DVD +/-RW was bought to replace my existing Pioneer A104. If found the 104 too slow writing at just 2 speed which dropped to single speed on re-writing. By contrast the Optowrite supports both major formats, writes at 4 speed, 2.4 re-write with +RW and 2 speed with -RW. This makes it far more usable especially when experimenting.