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."
Re:Moore's Law (Score:4, Interesting)
Catch-up! (Score:3, Interesting)
I really wish they'd start investing in dragging the cost of next-generation media down. Blu-Ray is great if you ignore the DRM aspects.. Which for data backup renders it perfectly adequate.
Though I'd much rather see something with a little more than 50GB of storage... But then, if they spent their R&D money on perfecting/improving the multi-layer technology, we'd all be backing-up to n*25GB discs in no time.
Why waste all the research budget on ageing technology, when it takes a whole spindle of DVD-Rs to back-up my 2TB RAID array?
Re:Moore's Law (Score:3, Interesting)
They tried that with CD readers long ago; I believe it was Kenwood CD-ROMs that had multiple lasers so different tracks could be read in parallel, allowing a higher bandwidth without having to rotate the disc any faster.
It died after a while. It probably simply cost too much, and people just weren't willing to pay that much so they could read CDs faster, when dirt-cheap 24x drives are available.
Writable DVD is trash anyways (Score:4, Interesting)
Even DVD-RAM is not very good, as I found hwen evaluating 6 different media. I have no diea what people use these for, but backup, data storage and data exchange are all very bad ideas in this consumer-trash. Writing trash faster makes in not better at all.
Re:Moore's Law (Score:5, Interesting)
The faster the disc spins, the stronger the laser has to be. The lasers in DVD burners are already powerful enough to do real damage. There's probably some reluctance on manufacturers' part to hand out class-IV lasers for $29.99 with mail-in rebate.
Re:I burn DVDs at 4x (Score:1, Interesting)
Hard disk space is cheaper than DVD space.
Absolutely not true.
1.5 TB hard drive [newegg.com] - $130
300x 4.7 GB DVD-Rs [newegg.com] - $54
Even allowing for an extra 100 pack of DVDs to make up the difference, DVD-Rs are still half the cost/GB of hard drives.
Re:Get off my lawn... (Score:2, Interesting)
I remember when I had two 40 MB hard drives (this was before CDs). My Dad told me stories about people with 200 MB hard drives, and I wondered what they could possibly do with all that extra space.
Re:Moore's Law (Score:3, Interesting)
The shrapnel also buried itself 1" into the gelatin dummy (who had the same resistance to penetration [gotta be a better term for this but you get the point] as human flesh).
IIRC, this occurred at ~300x.
I think GP is a little wrong on the 16x thing. The limitation has been making a high enough powered laser to heat the bits to 200C in the split second the bit is being written.
Re:I burn DVDs at 4x (Score:2, Interesting)
Absolutely not true.
1.5 TB hard drive [newegg.com] - $130
300x 4.7 GB DVD-Rs [newegg.com] - $54
Even allowing for an extra 100 pack of DVDs to make up the difference, DVD-Rs are still half the cost/GB of hard drives.
If you want convenient access to your DVD-Rs, you'll want individual cases. These cost slightly more than the disks. Then you'll need a storage shelf and maybe some labels. Add these costs and DVDs and hards disks are roughly equal.
Re:make bad discs faster (Score:3, Interesting)
Luck?
Back in the day (a decade or so ago), I was the first kid on the block with an 8x Plextor SCSI CD burner. It was the fastest available at the time, aside from one released by Smart and Friendly just a few weeks earlier.
In the beginning, media was indeed a problem. A lot of blanks were still branded for 2x, most of them were 4x, and only a few were actually rated at 8x. Some had real issues, others seemed to work ok. After a semi-intensive study of different media, I found that silver (yes, silver - not aluminum) TDK Certified+ seemed to work the best in general. I had the impression at the time that such trial-and-error sessions were common at the time.
As time moved on, media improved, as did the firmware on the drive. Eventually, within a year or two of folks improving their CD-R chemistry and Plextor improving the firmware, the situation improved enough that I was able to buy whatever blanks were cheapest at Wal-Mart. Things always worked very well, and I never bothered much with burning below 8x.
Now: I can go back and read these decade-old disks, and they still work fine. I don't bother very often (after all, who wants to use an old backup of 98SE, or OS/2 Warp Connect Blue?), but whenever I do, things are good.
I'm really not sure what the problem is.
Re:make bad discs faster (Score:3, Interesting)
I've also never had a problem with CDs, but the issue is with DVDs. DVDs are much worse, presumably because of the higher data density.
Re:Moore's Law (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, it was a single laser that was split into multiple beams.
The technology behind the Kenwood drives was developed by an Israeli startup called Zen Research (they had their logo on the drive).
The drive ended up more expensive than it had to, because they ended up using separate ICs for each beam due to a bug in their ASIC, preventing using the ASIC's internal logic that was supposed to do the same. They were already very late so they didn't respin the ASIC.
They worked on the same logic for a DVD writer, but they were so late that the company went belly-up.
Re:Moore's Law (Score:3, Interesting)
If I remember correctly, Mythbusters had to use rotational speeds that were several times what a real drive will do. 300x or so?
One night my girlfriend were sitting at our PCs, which were right next to each other. We heard a very loud, very sudden bang or pop noise out of nowhere. Looked at each other, and looked around the room and couldn't figure out what that noise was.
When we couldn't figure out what that loud noise was, we forgot about it, and figured that if it was important, we'd find it eventually. So we went back to what we were doing.
She was starting up a game of StarCraft, and finally noticed that the game had failed to load, giving an error message about being unable to read the CD.
She tried again. It was then that it dawned on me what that noise might had been. I had certainly *heard* of optical discs exploding, but had not had it happen to me, nor anyone I personally knew.
Here's what was left, when I removed her drive:
http://pyromosh.org/images/misc/Broodwar_CD_explosion/ [pyromosh.org]
The drive was indeed hosed, as you might expect. But no shrapnel ever escaped the drive, nor even made a visible impact on the drive casing.
Re:make bad discs faster (Score:3, Interesting)
It isn't as simple as higher speed = poorer burn quality.
Check out CD Freaks, they have a lot of data on this sort of thing. For example, my Pioneer 16x DVD drive only burns 12x on most media, but a 12x burn is always better quality than an 8x burn. The method the drive uses to get 12x is simply better than the one it uses to get 8x, so on that drive burning at 12x is best.
This is quite often the case, as manufacturers tend to spend more time improving the maximum burn speeds for common media, rather than worrying about how well the 8x burn speed that no-one uses does. Chances are the 8x mode is inherited from older drives, and not state of the art like the 12x mode.