Several years ago Panasonic produced a CD drive designed to use PD cartridges; these are almost identical to the latest DVD-RAM media but had a capacity of 650MB. Not bad at the time but small by today's DVD standards. This cartridge style is still used for DVD-RAM and the Panasonic drive is backwardly compatible with the earlier PD units. If you've got a collection of PD discs then you'll be able to use them with this drive.

The unit we tested had a SCSI interface but no card - this is a cheap way to distribute drives to anyone with an existing SCSI setup, but if you've not got one then you'll need to buy a SCSI card - about £50 for something reasonable. Physically the drive is robust and we can see why LaCie chose Panasonic for its external unit. One novel feature is the loading method; discs and cartridges are not dropped into a caddy but effectively posted into an aperture at the front. In use this is very effective and enables easy removal of media from the drive.

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Installation was straightforward and everything worked first time. Panasonic uses the dual icon method to access either CD or DVD-RAM media and as the PD format is UDF-compliant these are usable via the DVD-RAM icon. This is a well-built drive that performs as well if not better than any of the others in this review. If you're looking for PD compatibility then this is your only choice and you'll be getting one of the best DVD-RAM drives too.