High Density CDs

goofrider writes "Sanyo introduced a new format called HD-Burn, supported by their new DVD+/-RW chip. It allows the drive to burn up 1.4GB of data using a regular 700MB blank CD-R blank. The resulting HD-Burned CD-R can only be read by supporting DVD/DVD-ROM drives and CD-ROM drives. Most DVD/DVD-ROM drives can support the format via a firmware upgrade. It's unclear how easy and how likely will it be for future drives to support this format. In contrast, Plextor released their new GigaRec technology in their new PlexWriter Premium (read a review here). GigaRec also records on regular blank CD-Rs, allows up to 1GB of data on a 700MB disc. however, the disc can be read on any modern good-quality CD-ROM drives with no firmware upgrades required. So now I can record 2x the data on a CD-R but I still can't have filenames longer than 64 characters. :)"

Sony already did this

[stratjakt]

Well, sortof, with their DD-CDR or whatever, using new tech to get 1.2 gig per disc.

If the two formats were compatible, it might almost be useful. Of course that's doubtful. So I cant really see the usefulness of this.

I thought maybe for archiving or something, but then the cost of the Sony drive is comparable to a DVD-R, so why would I want 1.2 gigs instead of 4.5?

These little fart in a jar techs will no doubt go the way of the zip drive. A day late and a dollar short - unless the industry works together for a standard thats cross compatible, and makes it ubiquitous.

Fuck it, I'll just burn two cds.

Music CD

[PaperJam]

Can you put music in CD format on these? I mean it said it can only be read by DVD-ROM or CDROM, but even if that is the case could you make a music CD out of it? What's preventing it from playing in your car stereo? I could understand the first one not playing because of how much compression there is, but the second one that is only putting 1 GB on the disk isn't quite as bad.

GREAT.

[Anonymous Coward]

You know how many problems people have with overburning crap? Come on, that was with an extra 12 megs on a 700 MB CD. This is an extra 700 MB on a 700 MB CD. Get real. It will be too prone to corruption to be of any real value.

700 -1000 -1400

[rwiedower]

I'm a little unclear as to who the target audience for this is. I can't remember any time I've sat down and thought "Damn, if only I had 300 more megabytes of space I could cram all my pr0n into ten cds instead of fifteen". Add in the firmware bit and you're targeting a non-existent audience.

Rebirth of the GD-ROM?

[linux11]

The Plextor GigaRec sounds similar to the tweek that Sega did to the DreamCast CD-ROM drives to read GD-ROM disks. I was wondering how long it would take for such a tweek to become mainstream.

DVD-R

[blackmonday]

With the steady decline in DVD-R prices, expect this to be a novelty, especially the version that needs a firmware upgrade for the drives. We'll be buying bulk packs of DVD-R's for $12 bucks very soon.

What's the read / write speed? I confess I didn't RTFA.

64 character limit...

[gpinzone]

Speacking of which, are there any cd burning programs that allow you to burn a CD with RockRidge and Joliet extensions on Windows? The closest thing I've found is a Java program called CD Everywhere. I've found the ISOs it creates don't always burn right using Nero. Anyone have another suggestion?

It might be eventually

[argmanah]

secondly the average user does not need any more space per CD than what is currently available, because for the average user the largest single file they'll burn on a CD is usually a divx movie, and that doesn't usually exceed 800 megabytes. if an entire back-up of a hard drive is what's needed, most would simply use a few cheap CDs as opposed to a single expensive DVD blank.

Eventually, if the new technology is cost affordable enough, the savings on number of CD's needed might be worth it.

Two years ago I would've told anyone who was getting a burner that it was extremely difficult to require more than 1 CD to back up all of a person's data (not apps, just the documents and other data created by them), especially on a Windows box that begs for a clean re-install every 6-12 months. However, nowadays with people having multi-gig MP3 collections being commonplace, it seems 640KB is in fact NOT enough for everyone. :)

Old Media, New Uses

[Anonymous Coward]

How many people had huge stacks of 720K 3.5" disks well after HD floppies drives came out? How many people weren't willing or able to spend 3 times the money on those new HD disks? I can say that I had many old floppies that suddenly became more useful once I learned all you had to do was drill a hole in the top lefthand corner to turn them into HD floppies. Sure...some crapped out. They weren't meant to be used as HD disks. But I actually still have some of those old disks, which are about 10-15 years old now, and they still work.

Now that I can have the same kind of capacity increase for CDRs, without modifying the media, I say that's progress, and will only help in transitioning to better technology once the prices come down. People will always need high storage capacities.

Nothing to see here. Move along, you lucky-loos!

[Ride-My-Rocket]

Yet another proprietary method of storing more information than was originally intended on a media (format? type?) that continues its inexorable descent into obsolesence.

Start pushing that Blu-ray DVD technology, people. At 4.7Gb, even standard DVDs are starting to look at little bit tired; with any luck, Blu-ray will become affordable around the time DVDs really start to seem limited, where storage capacity is concerned.

smaller physical size.

[Anonymous Coward]

I would like to see the 3.5 in size CD/DVD to be more popular. They just seem to be easier to carry in your pocket, etc.

Not going to happen

[ThomasFlip]

It seems as though a new data recording standard comes out every week. Until all major computer and hardware manufacturers agree on a single new standard, all of these new data recording technologies are just going to be niche products like the Iomega zip drive.

This has a use

[justinstreufert]

Everyone is going on about interoperability. Of course it's not compatible, these companies are just "making stuff up."

But there is a use - what about backups and other offline storage that are generally not shared, or shared only with coworkers? This could save lots of money on media among such users.

Don't knock it! As long as it doesn't cause rampant data corruption, that is..
Justin

Re:Sony already did this

[pmz]

These little fart in a jar techs will no doubt go the way of the zip drive.

Yeah, I bought a 250MB Zip drive right before the CD-R boom. That was a regrettable purchase, when everyone else was burning twice the capacity for a fraction of the cost. I can't imagine that those newer 750MB Zip drives are even selling the first production run.

Re:Nice idea, but...

[drinkypoo]

There is a market, and it is those persons who are about to upgrade from an old CDR[W] drive to a newer one, who are not upgrading to a DVD burner because of price, and who would like to fit longer DivX movies on a single inexpensive CD :)

It would also be useful between two people who each had a burner and a drive which would read the discs beside the burner, and who snailmailed CDs to one another. You could send, for example, a set of RAR files plus parity files (smartpar/mirror... what are those files actually called?) of a CD image on one CD. Of course, that's a pretty shady need... :)

Re:Another dead idea before it hits market

[drinkypoo]

Most publishing houses and the like have 250MB zip drives for the simple reason that commercial artists just go ahead and spend the money on shiny new toys. I mean they're very serious about it most of the time, they stick to their "I need this for work" story... But I've seen a bunch of mac users who have owned like, syquest and bernoulli at the same time. That was back in the day, but you get the idea. So anyway, the publishing houses would have 44/88mb syquest way into the modern age of the zip and sq135, and cdrw fer chrissakes. CD is now the leading medium, though, since everyone has one. Sure, it's not as easy to use since it doesn't behave exactly like just another filesystem, though there are schemes to accomplish just that like PacketCD.

The fact is, though, that it's not a medium suited to random read/write access since you can't erase something out of the middle of it. You probably could if you wrote your own software and tailored it to a drive or family of drives (plextor springs to mind, they seem to have a slightly richer command set than most manufacturers, but I suspect any or nearly any underrun technology could be exploited in this fashion somehow) but it's not really worth it. Hard drives are cheap enough now to where you don't need to try to find ways to use CDRWs of all things as near-line read/write storage. It's far better to just write things to them in big chunks and file them away. CDs are cheap enough in fact that you could use them for a disconnected filesystem and have an algorithm to discard old CDs as you removed enough data, constantly optimizing CDs and reburning them every few years and mirroring important data for longetivity. If you implement such a solution, do yourself a favor and make it support a commit log of file positions to a totally external device, eh?

64 characters?

[42forty-two42]

Are there technical reasons to use ISO9660? Does it have some special error correction, or could I just burn ext2 or something?

Re:OT, may the mods have mercy on my karma

[evilpenguin]

I remember the existence of hard-sectored floppies, but I never had drives that used them, so I am not the guy to ask.

My dad and I built our first computer. It was an S-100 bus machine. Some boards he bought, some he wire wrapped, and, by the end of it, we were photo etching our own circuit boards. We first booted it in 1976. He was (obviously) an electrical engineer, and I was a budding programmer (I was 10 years old).

I'm not sure the typical /. "whipper-snapper" realizes how cheap computers have become. My dad died a few years back. Later, we started cleaning out his shop. The old aluminum monster was still there, and I got an urge to fire it up. Alas, the electrolytic capacitors on several boards had leaked (each card on a S-100 bus does its own power regulation), ruining them. But I did also find a catalog. The price of an S-100 bus card with 16k of static RAM in the mid-1970's? About $800.

Re:Double density floppy anyone?

[SoSueMe]

What about Blu-ray [blu-raydisc.info]?
This from the Blu-ray Disc License Site:

Nine leading companies have jointly established the basic specifications for a next generation large capacity optical disc video recording format called "Blu-ray Disc". The Blu-ray Disc enables the recording, rewriting and play back of up to 27 gigabytes (GB) of data on a single sided single layer 12cm CD/DVD size disc using a 405nm blue-violet laser.

"Blu-ray Disc" Key Characteristics

1) Large recording capacity up to 27GB (single sided single layer).
2) High-speed data transfer rate 36Mbps.
3) Easy to use disc cartridge.

The companies established the basic specifications for the Blu-ray Disc are:

* Hitachi, Ltd.
* LG Electronics Inc.
* Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd.
* Pioneer Corporation
* Royal Philips Electronics
* Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd.
* Sharp Corporation
* Sony Corporation
* Thomson

This sounds like 1 gig on a CD would be very passé if it ever takes off.

Re:Nice idea, but...

[swb]

No one advocates that CDR isn't a useful and currently cheap technology.

The quesiton I had was why bother 'extending' CDR? Most existing CDRs won't be able to even read the new format (firmware update? Yah, for my 18 month old brand x drive? I doubt it), writing will require a new drive.

Instead, extend DVD-R. DVD-R penetration is low enough that the newer, faster drives that would support an extended format at a cheap price point come out, it will dovetail nicely with a high adoption rate of DVD-R enabling existing DVD-R users to upgrade to the extended format *and* enabling general uptake of the extended format.

Instead, extending the CDR format will leave most people unable to read the media, very low adoption since CDR is already big enough for some people, and those who want more room have already moved to DVD-R, which, BTW, is quite cheap -- IDE drives are $200 and blanks are $0.89 in quantity.

I still can't have more than 64 - you already do

[Festering Leper]

if you are using joliet for your cdrom then you are using a 128 character filename. every character you see in the filename is made from a 2 byte value (the other byte is usually a null value, and a complete waste for u.s. english) because of m$'s "unicode". from the coincidental number of bytes allowed in the filename i'll guess that the lesser-known "romeo" file system was joliet without unicode. the only difference is that support for the romeo filesystem has been pulled by the mainstream software for the mainstream os's :(

i don't want to come across as being language-centric? but i do believe that unicode is horrible waste of space. everything, used or not, is not expressed as a two byte value. filenames, formatted text from various m$ editors, all the text in any recent win32 exe (wonder why the filesizes continue to increase? all the strings are stored twice the size)

Re:Double density floppy anyone?

[spike hay]

and blank dvds are far less likely to be read if they get a small scratch

Surprisingly, blank dvds are much more resistant to scratches than CDs. Sure their data density is about 7 times as much. But DVD error correction is 10 times as good as CDs. Of course, it's madness that neither CDs or DVDs come in cartridges.

Re:Double density floppy anyone?

[unitron]

"Of course, it's madness that neither CDs or DVDs come in cartridges."

Amen, brother. Imagine how short the career of the 3.5 floppy would have been if they hadn't put them in those plastic things with the sliding shutter but just gave you the oxide coated doughnut. Imagine how much less of a pain to use CDs would be if they came enclosed in something along those lines. You could print the cover art right on them, you could accomodate increased densities and backwards compatibility with various notches and sliders, etc. But of course the CD started with the record industry (RIAA) and the idea of saving you from having to buy another copy of something because the first one got scratched is nothing short of the most heretical blasphemy to them.