A good seven and a half months after the launch of the first Blu-ray burner, Toshiba has finally struck back (PDF) with a 5.25" HD DVD burner. The new Toshiba SD-H903A can read and write both single-layer and dual-layer HD DVD discs, but only at a speed of 1x. At that speed, a 15GB single-layer HD DVD disc theoretically takes 55 minutes to write, while a 30GB dual-layer disc takes a whopping one hour and 49 minutes. The SD-H903A isn't very speedy with older formats, either: it burns single-layer DVDs at 8x, dual-layer DVDs at 2.4x, re-writeable DVDs at either 2.4x or 4x, and CD-Rs at 16x. Toshiba hasn't announced a price for the drive, but the company expects to begin shipping it in volume next month.
