Philips says all its CD-RW drives shipped from early 2002 will include its EasyWrite technology, which is essentially native Mount Rainier format support.

The announcement is not surprising as Philips is one of core proponents of the format, alongside Compaq, Sony and Microsoft.

The purpose of the format is to make CD-RW drives (and, in the future, recordable DVD drives) easier to use, primarily by allowing drag and drop functionality. This would let users treat the drive as a floppy drive or hard drive, making it an easier to use storage medium.

While packet-writing applications are already available from various third parties that allow this kind of functionality, the Mount Rainier initiative hopes to include this functionality seamlessly into the operating system, making it invisible to the user.

Formatting delays are also eliminated. This will happen as a background operation, allowing users to drag and drop immediately to their discs.

Some of the many contributors to the format include Dell, Hitachi, Roxio, Matsushita, LG, Acer and Gateway. ®

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Related Link
Mount Rainier Information Site