24x DVD Burners Hit the Market 140
KingofGnG writes "There is some uncertainty on which will be the one, between Sony Optiarc and Lite-On, to market the first drive of such kind, but the fact is that DVD burners will once again exceed the maximum write speed limit going from 22x to 24x. Both companies will release the new optical drives between March and May, and though in practice the speed difference isn't amazing at all, the new breakthrough shows that firms continue to invest in a technology with a surprisingly long life."
Standards do that... (Score:5, Insightful)
the new breakthrough shows that firms continue to invest in a technology with a surprisingly long life."
Hm, you mean that people are surprised that people would continue to invest in a technology that is the only standard* advanced optical disk? With memory capabilities that are good enough for most people (high def movies aside, DVDs have enough storage for just about everything) and the fact that any successors still are too expensive for most people? Wow, so surprising!
*Yes, Blu-Ray is as much of a standard as DVD is, but most computers do not have Blu-Ray and even most newer computers leave off Blu-Ray drives as do all Macs.
make bad discs faster (Score:5, Insightful)
What surprises me is that people still buy into this bad idea. While I really wish that I really could burn quality discs at high speed, I've learned the hard way that the higher the burn speed, the worse the quality of the burn. I don't care how fast a burner will burn a disc, I never burn faster than 4x. It took me a long time to convince myself that there was really any problem with high speed burns, after all, if these knowable manufacturers like Sony and Lite-on make the drives they must be good, right? But I've come to find that just isn't the case. Fortunately for the manufacturers, discs usually contain as much as 20% error recovery data, and this error recovery data can hide marginal burns. But I don't want error recovery information covering up bad burns, I want good burns in the first place, and I want that error recovery information to be available to correct later fine scratches, deteriorating optics, differences in the optics between drives, and just plain old "bit rot". You give that up when you burn at high speed, and in some cases the disk may not work at all, even if it passed a "verification" pass from the burning software.
I wish this wasn't the case, I really do. I've dome thousands of burns and the combined time increase to do those at low speed is not insignificant. But I've seen way too many problems from high speed burns that can be avoided completely by simply doing low speed burns. It is far better to take 15 minutes and get a good burn than to rush the burn in a couple of minutes but maybe have problems with it immediately, but even worse to have problems with it after the original data has been deleted and you find that you can no longer read the high speed burn.
Who cares? (Score:4, Insightful)
So this save like, what, 3 seconds burning a disc? Unless you're producing 100 copies of something, this is so inconsequential it's beneath Slashdot to even think about it let alone post it.
Re:Who cares? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Standards do that... (Score:5, Insightful)
They're obsolete. If a stack of DVDs are good enough to back up your full hard drive, your hard drive is either also obsolete, almost empty, or it's a flash drive.
Nobody's going to burn almost dvds to back up a $90 1 TB hard drive.
Re:Moore's Law (Score:5, Insightful)
people dont understand that all moore's law said is that every 18 months the number of transistors would double. It did not say anything more. It has been widely overblown into an entire economic concept of technological markets and commodities that progress in exponential/logarithmic ways.
Also, these things cannot suspend the laws of physics.
Re:I burn DVDs at 4x (Score:3, Insightful)
Even if a stack of DVDs and a hard drive were the exact same price per gigabyte you would still want to have the hard drive. The hard drive offers considerable more value than a stack of DVDs that cannot the average seek time of any random data is about a minute as you have to find the disc, load the disc, and so on.
As it stands now if you want to backup large chunks of data such as an entire HD then you should not be going with DVDs. If you want to backup DVDs or small files then DVDs are fine.
Re:Feh (Score:3, Insightful)
If you need physical media, flash drives are by far superior anyway.
Unless you want to play video on someone's SDTV. Then you need either a DVD player and a DVD burner, or a high-end DVD/DivX player with a USB port, or a PC with a $50 S-Video adapter.
Re:So last century! (Score:3, Insightful)
Exactly. You can already get an external 1.5 TB hd for $130.00 - between hard drives and solid-state devices, conventional rotating optical media are caught between a rock and a hard place. Time to switch to 3D encoding, or forget about it entirely.