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Hardware

CDRW Drives Hit 52X Speeds 365

Posted by CowboyNeal from the fastest-coasters-yet dept.
Sr.Mixalot writes "Just when you think you couldn't burn those shared MP3s any faster, Asus comes out with a 52X Burner. This review at Hot Hardware shows just how fast this drive is versus a Plextor 48X unit. Amazingly, this new breed of CDRW Drives can burn a complete 700MB CD in about 2.5 minutes!"
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CDRW Drives Hit 52X Speeds More

CDRW Drives Hit 52X Speeds

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  • Thanks, but no thanks. (Score:5, Funny)

    by roka ( 211127 ) on Saturday December 14, 2002 @10:11AM (#4886902)
    12x ought to be enough for everyone ;)
    • 12x ought to be enough for everyone ;)

      I've got myself a 24X burner, and I can burn a complete ~650MB ISO over my LAN (100BaseTX) in about 3:30 minutes. What more do I need?

      n.b. I was just telling a colleague last night that "Within three or four months, drives will re-write as fast as mine can write." Whoa.. Egg on my face!


      • "12x ought to be enough for everyone ;)"

        What? A number 2 pencil and several boxes of paper ought to be fast enough for everyone.

        No, forget the paper. Just memorizing everything should be fast enough.
        • In the 60's and 70's there were manual card-punches you could use to modify punched cards one column at a time. Slow, but it sure beat waiting in the line at the library for your turn at one of the two IBM keypunches available when your FORTRAN programming assignment is due the next morning.

          I would say that would be a better method than the #2 pencil, and more relevant to this discussion of computer-oriented storage.

          I have a friend who worked at a place where they used a Frieden Flexowriter to do their word processing. It stored documents on punched paper tape. There was one secretary who was skilled in the craft of splicing the punched paper tape. It was her job to edit and update form letters stored on paper tape.

    • Re:Thanks, but no thanks. (Score:4, Insightful)

      by cscx ( 541332 ) on Saturday December 14, 2002 @10:44AM (#4887055) Homepage
      All right, who's the asshole that's been modding all these level-headed posts down as "Troll?"

      My 12X burner can burn a whole CD in just over 6 minutes. This one is up to .... 2.5?!?! I can hardly contain myself!!

      Yeah, right.

      Let's realize that they haven't factored in the cost of 52X certified media. Thanks but no thanks, I can spare the extra 4 minutes. Plus, at those speeds, God knows what the failure rate of burning is --- ever heard a 52X screamer CD-Rom go up to speed? You can keep this, Asus.
      • "Let's realize that they haven't factored in the cost of 52X certified media"

        one thing i haven't really quite figured out is why the cdr media has to be "certified" up to a certain speed. the same way cars that can go faster have to make up for the increased speed with better tyres, aerodynamics, etc, shouldn't the increase in rotational speed of the cdrw drive be made up for by a stronger laser to make up for the decreased amount of time the cdr media is exposed to the laser?

        don't mean to start another technical debate but i can't seem to figure this one out.

  • LED magic (Score:5, Funny)

    by peculiarmethod ( 301094 ) on Saturday December 14, 2002 @10:11AM (#4886903) Journal
    'They glow green during read operations and yellow/amber during writes.'

    When is someone gonna post how to exchange the green LED for super duper bright blue?

    pm

  • Question (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Marxist Commentary ( 461279 ) on Saturday December 14, 2002 @10:12AM (#4886912) Homepage
    Are these just tricked up 48x drives like the 52x CD-ROM drives of a few years ago?

  • Great! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by MonTemplar ( 174120 ) on Saturday December 14, 2002 @10:13AM (#4886918) Homepage Journal
    Now we just need for CD-R/W media that can write *reliably* at 52x !

    I can see these drives being woefully under-utilised till middle of next year...

    • Re:Great! (Score:2, Interesting)

      by hackstraw ( 262471 )
      Here here! I only have a 12x burner and have burned hundreds of cds, almost all of them at 8x. Why? So I can reliably multitask and do something else while the burn is going on. When cdrecord ejects the disk, I take the one that just finished, label it, and put it in a stack with the rest and slap another one in the drive, rinse repeat. I was never in a hurry to burn a cd, I guess because I could burn them faster than I could listen/archive them. Oh yeah, etree [etree.org] rocks!

    • Re:Great! (Score:5, Insightful)

      by SN74S181 ( 581549 ) on Saturday December 14, 2002 @11:29AM (#4887257)
      It doesn't really matter. The main thing is to push the envelope, so that anybody staggeringly stupid enough to buy the 'top end' drive pushes down the price on the nice 36x drives the rest of us will purchase.
    • I can hardly wait until the 100X drives come out.
      Then I don't have to wait for the Sun to melt my CDs, because the drive will do it for me :-)

  • Yes but, (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 14, 2002 @10:14AM (#4886921)
    is it really worth paying some ghastly price per blank CD just do have it done it a minute instead of 10? It's not like many people spend all day burning discs ala factory-worker style.
    • I try to work out a lot, but sometimes it gets hard after a long strenuous work day. The one thing that does get me there time and time again is a good CD mix of my favorite (new) songs. Good music is key to a good workout.

      That being said, I do want to burn my CDs in less than 10 minutes. I have a 32X burner so that I can make them in 2 minutes after quickly deciding what to put onto my new personal greatest hits CD.

      I guess I could even make the (stretching it, I know) claim that my 32X burner has saved my life (or at least cut a few years off) due to the rigorous exercise that it has encouraged.
    • What are you talking about? I've been buying name brands on sale (typically $6 to $8 per 100 after rebate) and they've all been 48X certified for quite a while now. I didn't personally think that 8 cents a disc was a "ghastly price."

  • It's no great shock (Score:4, Interesting)

    by stratjakt ( 596332 ) on Saturday December 14, 2002 @10:14AM (#4886922) Journal
    That these cd-r speeds are ramping up so quickly.

    After all, they are using CAV not CLV to determine it's maximum speed.

    2.5 minutes is impressive until you realize that yesterdays cd-r burned in 2.51 minutes.

    Besides, it's no good for me.. Playstation and Xbox games don't come out reliably if burned any higher than 4x.

    • Re:It's no great shock (Score:5, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 14, 2002 @10:54AM (#4887088)
      Actually they are using CLV, but it is Z-CLV (Zone-CLV) burning usually starts around 16x, then ramps up to 20x a little ways into the disc, then to 24x, and so on. If you're only burning a half full disc, you'll never hit the zone where u get into the higher speeds. I wish they would stop with this Z-CLV crap and just do plain old CLV. If they used 52X CLV, then a disc would be able to be burned in about a minute and a half. Z-CLV requires the burner to actually stop burning, spin the disc up to the next zone speed, and then resume the burn. This stopping and starting can introduce errors in the disc, however they are usually taken care of by the ECC built into the ISO9660 format, The error correction on Audio CDs isn't as sophisticated, so u can sometimes hear pops on the disc where the burner stopped and restarted. Also since the error connection is being used to fix errors purposely put there by the burner, it leaves less correction to fix what it was put there for, the scratches that are usually inevitable throughout the life of the disc. If you want to burn discs without this Z-CLV crap, then burn at 16x or lower, 16x or lower on most Z-CLV burners is usually CLV mode. So 1x-16x=CLV, >16x =Z-CLV

  • my honest opinion (Score:5, Insightful)

    by MoceanWorker ( 232487 ) on Saturday December 14, 2002 @10:14AM (#4886924) Homepage
    I had a 2X burner since 1997.. got it for $250.. around then.. poor thing just recently died (R.I.P), but I feel that rather than buying a new CD-RW.. i think the best bet is to purchase a DVD-RW..

    After researching a bunch of CD-RW's and reviews, etc.. I went ahead and purchased a Sony DRU-500A for $310.. pricey of course, but eh..

    Just got it a week ago, and I'm impressed.. the CD-RW speed is only 24x, but the main thing is I can burn DVDs as well (which have been flawless, so far ;-))

    So I guess pricewise and maybe because it's still a new technology, a CD-RW might still be the best for some, but if you know DVD-RW's are round the corner and expect to get one very soon, might as well take that approach..
    • Over the years I have gone through several CDRW's 4x RICOH died and wouldn't write past the first track but would continue to read just fine, 32x Que! or something died in 3 months, and now I got a new 40x CDRW w/a new computer... The kernel reports that it is a 40x burner but the fastest it will burn is about 27x.

      I am afraid to even attempt to buy a DVD burner for fear of it burning a single DVD and dying w/no chance of replacement :(
      • have you tried downloading the newest ASPI drivers?

        btw, what's the OS you're running at?

        my father recently bought a 48X CD-RW (24x48x48) burner.. and he's still running Windows 95 on a Pentium-200.. it burns fine, but will only burn at most 24, IIRC.. yet he has no probs burning..
      • Many burners have a safety feature that only lets you burn as fast as the burner thinks the media can handle. Try different media; it may up the speed to 40x. There's also sometimes a software command to turn it off, although I don't know where that would be, and you run the risk of having iffy burnt CDs. This is under NERO on Windows; I don't know how it works under Linux/*BSD/. (I'm mainly a Mac OS X person myself, and I have a DVD-R in my machine; I just do a bit of work on the side on Windows.)

        Also, I don't believe most burners actually burn at anywhere near 40x for most of the CD... for the inside of the disc, they burn at a slower speed, then keep upping it until they hit 40x near the end. Basically the same thing most cheapo 52x readers do.

        Just a few thoughts. :)
        • Also, I don't believe most burners actually burn at anywhere near 40x for most of the CD... for the inside of the disc, they burn at a slower speed, then keep upping it until they hit 40x near the end. Basically the same thing most cheapo 52x readers do.

          That's part of my beef with CD writers. They can't really spin the CD much faster without risking shattering the media, so obviously CLV type writing would only slow things down, and a 40x drive doesn't end up being anywhere nearly twice as fast as a 20x because they have to ramp-up. My solution is to find a quality product line and buy the slowest rated version. I can stand to wait an additional 10% of time on a CD burn to save even as much as $40. The higher speed rated media is sometimes more expensive too.

          One benefit of a faster rated drive being released is that it does push down the prices of the slower drives.
  • the media falls apart and send shards of plastic into your jugular and eye socket?

  • Awesome (Score:5, Funny)

    by cioxx ( 456323 ) on Saturday December 14, 2002 @10:14AM (#4886926) Homepage

    This sounds a like a perfect recipe for Senseless Explosion [wustl.edu]

  • That's great and all, but... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by NineNine ( 235196 ) on Saturday December 14, 2002 @10:15AM (#4886930)
    ... I just want solid, reliable recording first. Sounds like the cart is being put before the horse first. I want a CD-R that's gonna burn perfectly every time. I don't care how fast it is. Burning something at 52x 4 times to get it to work (and making 3 coasters in the process) is slower than burning it at 12x. Besides, CD-R isn't generally a process that is needed to be done fast. It's for dupes or backups. Right now, I burn at 4x and it works every time. I won't go every faster until the drives/software are better.
    • .. I just want solid, reliable recording first. Sounds like the cart is being put before the horse first. I want a CD-R that's gonna burn perfectly every time. I don't care how fast it is. Burning something at 52x 4 times to get it to work (and making 3 coasters in the process) is slower than burning it at 12x.

      Enter BurnProof<tm>! While my Athlon XP1800+ and WD ATA100 hard drive rarely have trouble feeding my burner data at the full 24X, if the system is really busy the burn slows down. I've tested burning CDs while booting a VMWare Windows 2000 session and haven't produced a coaster yet. I also very rarely drop below 20X burn speed. The 32X at work is similar (and on a lower-powered Athlon, no less) but still doesn't often drop below 30X.

      Of course, were I burning an audio CD I'd likely drop the speed down to about 8X anyways, because some CD players don't appear able to read discs burned greater than that (the 10 CD changer in a friend's car, for example).

    • Just buy a Plextor. I've been using their 8x PR-820 drive for almost four years to the day.

      A few thousand burns later, I've got no trouble to report except with a bad batch of Verbatim media toward the end of 1999.

      And, mind you, this is for all manner of material -- from PSX archiving to music production to bulk duplication, usually on the cheapest media I can find. I've never burned at less than maximum speed.

      YMMV, HTH. But given this experience I'm not likely to ever buy anything other than Plextor in the future -- that is, if this drive ever dies so that I can justify replacing it.

    • Re:That's great and all, but... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by jridley ( 9305 ) on Saturday December 14, 2002 @11:27AM (#4887245)
      Dude, you're doing something wrong. I burn at 32X all the time and it's been hundreds of discs since I've burned a coaster. I burn at least 2 or 3 discs a day, sometimes as many as 30 or 40 if I'm doing duping runs.

      I used to burn lots of coasters until I gave up on crap quality blanks. I just buy Imations and Fujis when they're on sale for like $3 for 50 after rebate, and haven't had a problem since.

      When I was buying the $4 for 200 unbranded crap at Office Clone, yeah, I was throwing away 10 out of 50, even burning at 8x.

      I'm using a Sanyo OEM burner and a Teac laptop burner (which is only 24X) and a JVC 32X at work. The Sanyo was cheap and works as well as any recorder I've ever used.

      Always buy a drive with buffer underrun protection. If you're burning under Windows, make sure the drive is running in DMA mode, not PIO, or you'll have about 300 underruns burning a disc over 8X. Also beware; Windows sometimes SAYS it's in DMA mode but really it's in PIO; check Google for registry tweaks to fix it.

  • How to shatter a cd at 100x (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 14, 2002 @10:15AM (#4886933)
    I recall there was some experimentation to determine the maximum possible speed for existing cd drivers. What was found was that as one approached 100x, the physical media commonly used today would shatter. Sorry captain, she just wont take it! So, unless materials used for cd's change, there is an upper limit to this cd x speed madness...

    • Re:How to shatter a cd at 100x (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Actually it's more like 40-something times the spin speed of the original CD drives at which CDs shatter. There was an article about this on Slashdot a while ago. I tried searching for it to provide a link, but I couldn't find it.
      Many CD drives today are labled as being "52x" as if it means they spin 52x as fast as the earliest 1x caddy cd drives (horrible things).
      What they're actually refering to is a 52x (at peak) the transfer rate of the original CD drives, which if I remember rightly, was about ~150kb/s. My "2x" in 1995 could do 360kb/s.

  • Ummm... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by damiam ( 409504 )
    52x burners have been out for a while. I ordered a 52x Lite-On from newegg [newegg.com] a week ago (and recieved it a few days ago - it's fast). There are a few others burners out there too. I don't see how they can call it "fastest burner ever" without even testing the various other 52x burners.

  • comparison to LiteOn 52x? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by h0tblack ( 575548 ) on Saturday December 14, 2002 @10:16AM (#4886936)
    I wonder how this compares to other 52x drives out there like the LiteOn 52x24x52? [liteonit.com.tw]
    • I wonder how this compares to other 52x drives out there like the LiteOn 52x24x52?

      It's probably the same drive, rebranded as Asus.

  • Yea but.... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Chicane-UK ( 455253 ) <chicane-uk@ntlwor l d . c om> on Saturday December 14, 2002 @10:16AM (#4886940) Homepage
    I find that the faster you burn CD's at, the more regular CDROM drives have issues reading them. And this isnt with cheap media either - I always use Sony or TDK or similar.

    We have a nice 30 something speed plextor CDRW at work, but whenever I burn something there, I set it down to about 12 or 16 speed to make sure its going to work ok on my Pioneer DVD drive at home.

  • Slashdot has gotten stupid... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by alienw ( 585907 ) <alienw@slashdot.gmail@com> on Saturday December 14, 2002 @10:17AM (#4886945)
    First, Lite-on had a 52x drive for a while now. Secondly, even 24x drives burn a cd in 2.5 minutes. Thirdly, this is just a blatant plug for a shitty hardware review site.
    • 2.5 minutes is good, but you still need someone to sit there and change the CDs over. Are there any CD robots which can change the disc over and start burning another? That could fill the middle ground between an ordinary CD burner and a big CD pressing plant.

      You could have an automated setup that burns the latest Debian unstable every fifteen minutes...
      • We use the RImage Desktop [rimage.com] product to duplicate our CDs. Load up 50 blanks in the hopper and start burning. The arm grabs a CD, puts it in the printer to print the label, removes it from the printer and puts it in the drive, burns the CD, and places it in the output hopper. The model we have is pretty old and is SCSI based. Their new ones are Firewire and much faster than ours. We plan on upgrading in the spring.

        Jason

    • We bought one of these lite-ons at CompUSA on special about a month ago. They ran out of a slower Buslink drive they had advertised, and sold us a 52x Buslink for $100 instead (it's a rebranded lite-on). It seems to work pretty well so far with the memorex media we've been using, but I can't say we've stressed it much (it's in a test machine).

      -Paul Komarek
    • "Secondly, even 24x drives burn a cd in 2.5 minutes."

      Maybe if those cd's are 300MB, otherwise a real 650-700MB cd will take a minimum of 3:45 to burn a full cd at 24X. The only ones that can burn a full disc in 2:30 minutes ARE the 52X drives. Unless of course you were ignoring leadin and leadout or finalizing, which of course makes no sense sine they are part of the burn process.
  • http://wuarchive.wustl.edu/users/tom/mirrors/cdexp lode/

    notable excerpt:
    "A 64x drive using CLV would have to rotate the disc with 33,920 rpm when reading an inner track, exposing the hub of the disk to a tangential force of some 45 N/mm2. A point on the periphery of the disc will be moving with 213 metres per second, slightly more than half the speed of sound. Can the disc take that?

    The answer is no. A powerful no.

    At about 52x, i.e. 27,500 rpm, most manufacturer's CDs blew up in a rain of plastic particles, leaving their marks on the premises. The result was a pile of shimmering plastic chips."

  • is this really an improvement? (Score:5, Funny)

    by EvilStein ( 414640 ) <spam@BALDWINpbp.net minus author> on Saturday December 14, 2002 @10:20AM (#4886960)
    I guess that the higher numbers sound kind of cool, but when the thing has a glitch that flings the CD-R media out of the drive at 5000mph, nearly severing your head and wedging itself in your stereo, you've just gotta ask yourself "Is burning a CD 2 minutes faster worth the risk?"

  • 2.5 Minutes? (Score:5, Funny)

    by anonicon ( 215837 ) on Saturday December 14, 2002 @10:24AM (#4886978)
    That's still a lot slower than the matter generator on Star Trek. When the hell are we going to get those? :-D
    • 2.5 minutes = 150 seconds.

      700 megabytes * 1024 / 150 = ~4779KB/sec.

      4779 K/sec / 150 K/sec = ~32X speed.

      Wake me up when we get 40x burners...

  • You can tell something is obsolete when... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by the eric conspiracy ( 20178 ) on Saturday December 14, 2002 @10:27AM (#4886988)
    it has been perfected.

    DVD burners are really looking good these days. At 4x DVD you can burn the equivalent of 8 CD's on 1 DVD in 15 minutes.

    Faster, more convenient and occupies less space on that already crowded CD rack.

  • Faster than what? (Score:4, Informative)

    by travail_jgd ( 80602 ) on Saturday December 14, 2002 @10:31AM (#4887006)
    Amazingly, this new breed of CDRW Drives can burn a complete 700MB CD in about 2.5 minutes!"

    My trusty 16x CDRW can burn a 700 MB CDR in about 5 minutes, and faster burners give slightly better performance. (For the uninitiated, faster burners (24x and higher) write most of the CDR slower than their "maximum" speed.) This CDRW is probably only running at 52x for a minor portion of the burn.

    OTOH, the CDRW speeds are starting to ramp up nicely. I like using CDRWs to back up files, but even at 10x it can take a while to burn a full disk. For many CDRW enthusiasts, the big story isn't the "quantum leap" from 48x to 52x, its the CDRW speeds.
  • An increase from 48X to 52X only represents an 8.33 percent increase in speed. Am I the only one not impressed by this?

    -- jetlag --

  • What about... (Score:5, Funny)

    by atomico ( 162710 ) <miguel@cardo.gmail@com> on Saturday December 14, 2002 @10:36AM (#4887024) Homepage
    ... a CD-RW drive that lasts more than two years, even with light use? And records reliably?


    That would be sooo nice... maybe our grandchildren will see it :)

    • Um... I have a yamaha 4x SCSI burner that I got waaaaay back (when 4x was as fast as they could get to work) and it still works perfectly (albeit not as fast as my 24x Yamaha ATAPI drive I got for my other computer). Perhaps you should try a reputable brand instead of the Wal-Mart blue-light specials if you expect reliability and durability.
      • I had the same thing: Yamaha 4x SCSI burner that ran like a champ and never coastered unless I did something stupid during the burn. Granted, on the Mac at least, Toast pre-buffers the data into RAM before burning.

        Sadly, I left it on overnight in a crappy external case and it overheated somehow. The HP I got to replace it couldn't do the Verify faster than 8x which made for some slow-ass burns. Grr. Then I just got an LG DVD/CDR/W combo drive for the internal bay. Works like a champ.
      • That's funny. My Yahama 4x SCSI in my PC at work had the eject mechanism break. It did get constant use for over a year though. I also had an old Sony 2x SCSI in my PC years back that also had the eject mechanism break. But this thing was OG. It used CD Caddies. The caddy got stuck inside and I couldn't get it out. Quite sad.
    • Plextor - PlexWriter 12/10/32A
      Ricoh - MP6200S (2/2/6 SCSI)

      Both still working OK.

    • I have a QPS drive (made by Sanyo) that I've had for about 2 years, but it's had very heavy use, burning probably 3000 discs in that time, and it's still running fine.
      We have a bank of Plextor 8X recorders at work in the data conversions room that have burned something on the order of 15 discs a day for several years. Admittedly, these were replacements for crap-o Teac recorders; we had 15 of them and ALL of them failed between 1 and 6 months after the warranty expired.

  • This is gonna cost me.. (Score:5, Funny)

    by grub ( 11606 ) <slashdot@grub.net> on Saturday December 14, 2002 @10:58AM (#4887107) Homepage Journal

    2.5 minutes == 24 coasters an hour

    Even AOL doesn't send me this many!

  • Actually... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Tuxinatorium ( 463682 ) on Saturday December 14, 2002 @11:26AM (#4887239) Homepage
    Lite-On has had a 52x/24x/52x model out for a long time now. It started selling at Newegg.com in the beginning of november for about $79

  • Obligatory Simpsons reference (Score:5, Funny)

    by graveyhead ( 210996 ) <fletch AT fletchtronics DOT net> on Saturday December 14, 2002 @11:29AM (#4887258)
    CowboyNeal: It can burn a cd in 2.5 minutes.

    Homer: Aww 2.5 minutes. I want it now!

  • Theoretical Limits? (Score:4, Informative)

    by ZeLonewolf ( 197271 ) on Saturday December 14, 2002 @11:30AM (#4887262) Homepage

    Looks like we're getting within an order of magnitude of the theoretical limits of CD-burning! PIO mode 4 caps at 16.7M/sec, which is about 111x, less than double! I bet soon we'll be seeing UDMA or even ATA/66/100/133 CD-R/DVD-R drives... I imagine there's a need for some extra headroom as far as IDE bus bandwidth is concerned...

    This actually raises an interesting thought...supposing your drive is 52x at PIO4, would you get a buffer underrun if both the source and destination drive in a burn operation are on the same IDE channel? It would seem, then, that you'd want, at a minimum, slightly more than double the bandwidth of the writer in the IDE bus that it sits on...

    Hmmm...

  • great! (Score:2, Funny)

    by gumbi west ( 610122 )
    Come on people this is really amazing! a 9% increase! This is as great as when we went from 2x to 2.18x.

  • Pardon my Ignorance (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Stigmata669 ( 517894 ) on Saturday December 14, 2002 @12:07PM (#4887410)
    But shouldn't we measure CD-R speeds in multiples of burn time rather than CVA? Problems like this lame release would be solved. 1x burner... 70 min for a 70 min cd. 2x = 35 min. etc. Thus a burner that creates a cd in 2.5 minutes is 28x.

    Thus the headline should read 28.32x burner released, compared with 28x, saves you 15 seconds!!

  • Law of Decreasing Return With 90% Chance of Rant (Score:5, Insightful)

    by shoemakc ( 448730 ) on Saturday December 14, 2002 @12:17PM (#4887446) Homepage

    Which was a bigger deal, the jump from 2X to 4X or 48X to 52X? Even ignoring the fact that the faster drives use a form of CAV and not CLV, a jump from 48 to 52 is... ...that's right, not even 2% faster. Factor in that it's hard to find media that will consistantly burn properly at those speeds, and well, what's the point?

    And I don't want to hear from those people who say "well i've burned 100's of cd's at 48X and they all work fine for me." Yeah, in that one cdrom you use them in. Have you ever used the nero testing utility to check the number of C1 errors on those "perfect" disks of yours? Yeah they may work on your drive, but how about someome elses? And how about a year from now when they have a few scratches in them? I for one would hate to maintain multiple versions of disks, one for me, and one for everyone else.

    In the end it all comes down to this. How much time does 52X save if you just have to burn it again anyway?

    My advice is this....if you're getting a new burner, by all means get a fast one. When you start using new media, run some tests to find a safe speed, and then stick with that. But to those of you who ditch your perfectly fine 32X+ writer to buy a new 52X one...I think you're fools.

    -Chris

  • Lite-On Drives (Score:2, Informative)

    by badasscat ( 563442 )
    Not only have Lite-On had a 52X drive out for a while, you can also flash the firmware [cdfreaks.com] from an "old" 48X drive up to 52X speed. An "overclocked" Lite-On drive is no different, hardware-wise, than the real thing.

    That said, my 48X Lite-On is fast enough for me - and no, I've not burned any coasters writing at that speed. Those of you who believe it's impossible are living in the stone age - high speed writing is here and it works great. And it's cheap! Paid $53 for my drive, and 48X media is no more expensive than slower media - just as with the hardware, as the media improves it replaces the older, slower media at the same price.

    There are physical characteristics of CD's that worry me about 52X writing (or reading), however, and that's why I won't go that high - it's not a question of getting a bad write, but a serious issue of exploding discs [guru3d.com] at such a high rotational speed.
  • One of the cheaper brands (Cendyne?) has had a 52X CD-RW (It's 52X read/write, 48X rewrite) at my local OfficeMax for a few months now.

    Doesn't matter, though. I still use my trusty Memorex CRW-1622 that I bought 5 years or more ago. 37 minutes to burn a CD, but I have *never* gotten a coaster. :)

    Of course, the reason I knew about the other brand of 52X burner mentioned above is because I've been eyeing a new burner for a few months now!

  • Shattered CD (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Born2Die ( 631289 )
    I have one of these babies...they are awesome...beware of dodgy media though...one of them shattered in my drive...and it was an original...I had seen a very slight crack on the inside but never thought much of it but these drives spin so bloody fast so beware click link below to see the handywork...anyone else had any similar experience with these superfast drives?...Oh yeah, the drive was replaced so that was great.... http://www.geocities.com/athlonxpnz/jedi-outcast-s hattered-cd.jpg

  • Do the math (Score:4, Informative)

    by FearUncertaintyDoubt ( 578295 ) on Saturday December 14, 2002 @03:52PM (#4888422)
    Let's say you're burning an 80 minute CD. At the theoretical max speed of the burner, here's how it breaks down:

    speed time improvement
    1 80.00 --
    2 40.00 50%
    4 20.00 50%
    8 10.00 50%
    12 6.67 33%
    16 5.00 25%
    24 3.33 33%
    32 2.50 25%
    40 2.00 20%
    48 1.67 17%
    52 1.54 8%

    Notice that you get a 33% increase going from 8x to 12x, but only 8% going from 48x to 52x. Because speed and time are inversely related, you get a hyperbolic function that gives you diminishing returns on your time savings with each speed increment. You save 40 minutes going from 1x to 2x, but 1:40 going from 24x to 48x. Drives are marketed by speed, but the real benefit to the user is time.

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