Sometimes known as CD-E(CD-Erasable)enables you to write your own CD's.Soon it will be possible to purchase fully re-recordable CD drives. Philips Electronics and Ricoh have already introduced and demonstrated erasable CD-ROM's. The CD-E standard is currently being developed and supported by more than ten manufacturers, including IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Mitsubishi, Mitsumi, Matsushita, Sony, 3M, Olympus, Philips, and Ricoh.
The new medium has an archival life of more than 10 years, or roughly 10,000 access cycles, and will allow atleast 1,000 overwrites to occur. As such it is not intended to replace magnetic media for primary online storage,but can supplement it for archival purposes. The media has a lower optical reflectability than standard CDs, requiring a five-times increase in read/write gain for the drive units.
This new technology is backward compatible with standard CD-ROM and CD-R(CD-Recordable) technology, meaning that CD-E drives would read existing CD or CD-R discs. These new drives will initially be expensive, but if the price falls, it may catch on as a viable backup and online storage solution.
