Toshiba's Road Warrior Friendly HD DVD USB Burner

As soon as Toshiba rolls out the first HD DVD burner tailored for notebooks, you know the same drive will show up inside an external USB enclosure shortly after. The new hi-def media writer displayed at IFA in Berlin measures just 126 x 126 x 13 mm and weighs merely at 165g. It's so ultra portable that if this thing can be powered by a single USB cable, I bet most road warriors and even desktop owners would order one from Toshiba UK.

The latter group will need a HDCP-compliant card and display or go for an analog VGA display option. The burner likely to be based on the SD-L902A is compliant with anything from CD-R/W, DVD+/-RW, HD DVD-ROM to double-layer HD DVD-R. So you can cram as much as 30GB data on a single HD disc.

Toshiba did release a HD DVD ROM drive in the Q2, but at $370, no sane person would buy this when a dedicated player costs $100 less.