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Data Storage Hardware

Plextor First With A 12x DVD+R Drive 271

Posted by timothy from the far-faster-than-average-burners-remember dept.
Tesko writes "It seems the first 12x DVD+R drive has been released by none other than Plextor, with their Model PX-712A (Product link here). The drive's write speed includes, 48X CD-R, 24X CD-RW, 12X DVD+R, 8X DVD-R, 4X DVD+RW, 4X DVD-RW. And it's read speed comes in at 48X CD-ROM/CD-R, and 16X DVD-ROM. Also noteworthy, the drive apparently has a 8MB buffer."
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Plextor First With A 12x DVD+R Drive More

Plextor First With A 12x DVD+R Drive

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  • I'd never buy one of these! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Eric Smith ( 4379 ) * on Sunday May 09, 2004 @07:08PM (#9102655) Homepage Journal
    If they can't keep their web page from blinking, I'm not going to trust the product. That's incredibly obnoxious!

    [I've used other Plextor products and been happy with them.]

  • The good old days (Score:5, Funny)

    by LordoftheFrings ( 570171 ) <null@ f r a g fest.ca> on Sunday May 09, 2004 @07:08PM (#9102658) Homepage
    Remember the good old days when you could list your optical drive specs with only 3 numbers? For example, "I just got a new CD Burner! It's 32x16x8" Now, it's what? 48x12x8x8x8x32x32x48. Just freaking perfect. This is what multiple standards do to us.

  • If only ... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by TheGavster ( 774657 ) on Sunday May 09, 2004 @07:10PM (#9102673) Homepage
    Now if only I had 4GB of something to burn to disc that fast ... For critical files, I'm going to run at low speeds for safety, for less critical stuff I'll probably be on a CD, if for no reason other than media costs.
    • I remember reading somewhere that when you are burning a disc, using the lowest speeds is more corruptive than the highest, at least for CD's. YMMV.

      ~S

    • Re:If only ... (Score:5, Informative)

      by James_G ( 71902 ) <james@globalmegac[ ].org ['orp' in gap]> on Sunday May 09, 2004 @07:24PM (#9102761)
      less critical stuff I'll probably be on a CD, if for no reason other than media costs.

      Media costs? Well let's see..

      25 4X DVD+R for $31 [newegg.com]
      100 52X CD-R for $31 [newegg.com]

      So that's.. 25*4700MB[*] / 31 = 3.7GB/$ for DVDs

      And.. 100*700MB / 31 = 2.2GB/$ for CDs.

      Add in the fact that, to burn 4.7GB in CDs takes 7x700MB CDs, so you're doing a lot more disc swapping.. I can't see any reason to use CDs. Especially not for media cost reasons. Yeah, you can get cheaper media than that, but if you want good quality stuff, this is the range you're looking at.

      [*] DVDs are 4700MB, not 4.7GB (4812MB)

      • Re:If only ... (Score:2, Insightful)

        by FlipmodePlaya ( 719010 )
        DVD drives are not yet as ubiquitous as CD drives. For a backup of critical data, I'd want to be able to read it at as many places as possible. For that, I'd say a CD is your best bet. That doesn't always matter, though.

        • Re:If only ... (Score:5, Interesting)

          by sunspot42 ( 455706 ) on Sunday May 09, 2004 @08:41PM (#9103109)
          >DVD drives are not yet as ubiquitous as CD drives.
          >For a backup of critical data, I'd want to be able
          >to read it at as many places as possible.

          Huh?? How on earth did this post get modded "insightful"? I've had a DVD drive in my PC since 1999. I think you'd be hard pressed to find a home PC that *didn't* have a DVD drive. Personally, I haven't seen one in several years now.

          Corporate PC's might be another matter, but then, you've got the network and LOTS of PC's to choose from in that environment. I'm sure one of the hundreds of machines at the typical corporate site will have a DVD drive.

          And since vanilla DVD-ROM drives can be had for around $30 or so, it's not like they're some exotic technology nobody could afford to add to a machine, in the unlikely event they're somehow stuck with DVD backup discs they can't read because some PC dinosaur doesn't have a DVD-ROM drive.

          If you're so worried about being compatible with "as many places as possible", backup to 3.5" floppies. They're ubiquitous. At 1.44MB a pop though, be prepared to deal with 1,000+ discs to backup today's average PC hard drive.

          • Re:If only ... (Score:4, Informative)

            by TravisWatkins ( 746905 ) on Sunday May 09, 2004 @10:11PM (#9103506) Homepage
            Actually your more likely to be able to use a CD than a floppy. New systems from Dell don't have have floppy drives in the default config.
          • I don't have a DVD drive mainly because I'd have no use for it other than movies and I'd rather watch movies on my TV.

            I might get a DL burner for backups but that would be the only use I would have for it.

      • Re:If only ... (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Noehre ( 16438 ) on Sunday May 09, 2004 @07:46PM (#9102884)
        They're actually 4.3GB/4400MB.

        They use the lovely base-10 gigabyte.

        • Re:If only ... (Score:3, Informative)

          by James_G ( 71902 )
          Ah, good point. I took this into account for the GB calculation, but not MB and KB.. so it's actually..

          4700000000 bytes = 4589843KB = 4482MB = 4.37GB.

          Going back to my original calculation..

          25*4.37GB / 31 = 3.5GB/$ for DVDs

          So, still considerably cheaper.

      • [*] DVDs are 4700MB, not 4.7GB (4812MB)

        Actually no. DVDs are 4700 mln bytes, which is around 4472MB AFAIR.

        Robert

        PS Well, most DVDs I use are 4,706,000,000 bytes or so.
        • 4700MB is actually 4700 million bytes. You're supposed to use MiB for 2^20 bytes and MB for 10^6 bytes. Not that anyone cares though because it seems the storage manufacturers are the only ones who use it (gee, I wonder why.)
      • I can't see any reason to use CDs.

        Everybody in the world except perhaps for Osama Bin Laden's dishwasher has a CD-ROM drive on their PC. When you burn a CD for a stranger, then you know that they will be able to read it.

        Not so with DVD. Market acceptance of DVD-ROMs is still low and will probably not catch on like CDs did in the mid 1990s because of the huge number of DVD movie players being sold cheaply.

        When the media cost of DVD (on an average) falls to about 50% that of CD-ROM for the sa

  • Eh, no big (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 09, 2004 @07:12PM (#9102683)
    An 8x burner is pretty fast, so 12x isn't really that big of a deal. This like the 48x burners vs. the 32x burners. We're talking only a couple minutes difference. The next big leap is the dual layer drivers.

    • Re:Eh, no big (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 09, 2004 @07:29PM (#9102786)
      More importantly when and are you going to find reasonably priced 12X media? 8X media isn't even common everywhere. This drive doesn' have much going for it over current 8X burners or the new DL burners that are just coming out.
    • The next big leap is the dual layer drivers.

      Don't know if drivers was a typo, but what you said may be more true than you realize - the switch to writing to DL (dual layer) DVDs is looking like it might be accomplished with a simple firmware upgrade, at least for some drives. Check this [anandtech.com] out for a little more info (basically, a new DL writer appears to use exactly the same controller as a single layer writer, so it looks like the difference is largely a firmware thing).

  • please explain. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by j3ll0 ( 777603 ) on Sunday May 09, 2004 @07:13PM (#9102687)
    Black CD tray minimizes jitter

    Can anyone with a bit of know-how explain why the colour of the tray would minimse Jitter?

  • A friendlier link (Score:5, Informative)

    by Spad ( 470073 ) <slashdot@ s p a d . co.uk> on Sunday May 09, 2004 @07:14PM (#9102697) Homepage
    European Page [plextor.be] sans-flashing.

    You'll also note that us lucky non-US customers get a 2-year On-Site collect and return warranty. Woo!

  • Speedy. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 09, 2004 @07:16PM (#9102706)

    1385KB/s * 12 = 16620KB/s, or in other words: the buffer will empty in half a second if the stream dries up. Good thing we have linking.

    (I assume it's zoned so the real numbers will probably be slightly less)

  • Sweet (Score:5, Interesting)

    by SavedLinuXgeeK ( 769306 ) on Sunday May 09, 2004 @07:17PM (#9102718) Homepage
    That definately will decrease backup time, I mean with dual layer coming out, and if the speeds keep increasing for drives, this could become a viable realtime backup solution, especially using a disc changer. Im not saying it will be blazing, but for smaller companies, it could definately help cut costs. Just seems very cool.

  • 8Mb buffer? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by reality-bytes ( 119275 ) on Sunday May 09, 2004 @07:20PM (#9102735) Homepage
    Knowing the data-rates that can be involved with DVDs I would have thought that 8Mb is only maybe a seconds worth of 'incident' time during a write.

    As it is, I've already reached a happy medium where I only burn at 12x on my CDR because I know that no matter how shoddy the media I use in the drive is, i've got a 99% chance of a sucessful burn.

    I imagine, that if I was to buy a DVD writer I'd end up in the same 'middle-ground' - I don't even know if I can find a use for all this 'speed' when writing sessions are usually relegated to coffee breaks and lunchtimes anyway.
    • well, considering that BurnProof is more or less in every single drive, and that most of the older DVD Burners (going off memory) only have a 2MB buffer, a 4x larger buffer is not something I'm going to be complaining about. It helps HDs, why not DVD-RW drives?

    • Re:8Mb buffer? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by NerveGas ( 168686 )
      12X to get a 99% chance? Wow.

      I use a Sony 40x burner with buffer underrun, and choose the "optimal" setting. If I'm burning a large ISO, by the end of the disk, it'll be sustaining 34x to 38x, and out of many hundreds of disks, I've got a *100%* success rate.

      steve
      • The general point I was making is that I always buy 'bargain' disks - some of which may be visably faulty before they've even been in the drive.

        Burning at 12 speed on a 2 year old drive pretty much guarantees success

        And as I said, when you do burning in the time that the system would otherwise be unused, you get 100% resource dedication to the operation.
    • 8Mb is one megabyte
      8MB is eight megabytes

      The case of the 'b' is very important, although I suppose not as imortant as the "m", as lower case is milli, and upper case is mega.

      At 12x write, I guess an 8MB buffer would be data that is exhausted in less than a tenth of a second. It is still useful for keeping things going smoothly because BURNPROOF slows things down a lot when the drive runs out of data. Many drives still have 2MB.

      It is a bit of a concern as EAC says it prefers to not have any buffers at a
      • Yes, you guessed correctly that I was trying to imply 8 Megabytes buffer which I thought was a very small ammount considering the rate at which it could be exhausted.

        Of course, it would be interesting to know if that same 8MB buffer is available for all write modes including CDR which could be quite useful as it is a reasonable ammount.
    • You don't need to worry about it, at least if you have a good drive. New drives have technology that gets called things like SmartLink and BurnProof but what it adds up to is if the datastream is interrrupted and their buffer goes empty, they just wait, then resume burning, no coaster.

  • Ooo... (Score:2, Funny)

    by daishin ( 753851 )
    This is great, now the bootleggers over here will be able to produce more dvds!

  • Psshht! (Score:5, Funny)

    by AssProphet ( 757870 ) * on Sunday May 09, 2004 @07:28PM (#9102780) Homepage Journal
    Optical storage is for wimps.
    Real nerds memorize their data!

  • So... (Score:3, Funny)

    by JessLeah ( 625838 ) * on Sunday May 09, 2004 @07:28PM (#9102782)
    How many DVD burners is that the "equivalent" of? ;)

    • Yes (Score:2)

      by mrsev ( 664367 )
      One million *IAA burners. ...What!.. why does nobody tell me these things! ..One billion *IAA burners

  • Dead Technology! (Score:5, Informative)

    by Lord Apathy ( 584315 ) on Sunday May 09, 2004 @07:33PM (#9102804)

    12x speed is very nice but this is still a single layer dvd writer. The first of the dual layers will be out in a few weeks. Sony is sceduled to be out the 16th. You can already preorder it. The specs this beast are nice but its dead on the floor. Wait till the dual layer is here then they will be giving them away.

    • Re:Dead Technology! (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Quarters ( 18322 ) on Sunday May 09, 2004 @07:48PM (#9102889)
      Not really. Dual Layer is nice, but, from what I've heard, it's slow. A fast 4.7GB single layer DVD burner can be useful to a large number of people who aren't, "It's new therefore I must have it and deride everything else and the people that buy those lesser devices" geeks.
      • 2.4X dual layer really isn't too bad of a speed for dual layer, which is the initial speed available for dual layer.

        I don't think there is a point in buying a 12x single layer-only drive. I think having a drive that writes 8x single layer and 2.4x double layer is far more useful than one that writes 12x single layer and double layer not at all.

        • Re:Dead Technology! (Score:4, Informative)

          by Lord Apathy ( 584315 ) on Sunday May 09, 2004 @10:22PM (#9103560)

          From what I've read its not quite that bad. The first layer is burned at 8x. It's the second layer that is burned at 2.4x. That I can live with. Most of us are going to use this to back up movies that we have bought that are dual layered. Most dual layered dvds are between 5 and 7 GB long. So basiclly you will be writing between 1 and 3 GB to the second layer at 2.4x. Not bad, not good, but not bad.

      • Re:Dead Technology! (Score:3, Informative)

        by doormat ( 63648 )
        A recent article [anandtech.com] showed that the DL write speeds at 2.4x. So you can spend 45mins burning 1 DL DVD, or 2x 15min burning two DVDs at 8x.

        • Re:Dead Technology! (Score:3, Insightful)

          by dbretton ( 242493 )
          A recent article [anandtech.com] showed that the DL write speeds at 2.4x. So you can spend 45mins burning 1 DL DVD, or 2x 15min burning two DVDs at 8x.

          Yup, but, if I am backing up a DL DVD, then here are my options:
          1) Dual Layer option:
          backup + burn (~ 1 hr)
          2) Single Layer option 1: (shrink)
          strip + requantize + burn (~2hrs)
          3) Single Layer option 2: (shrink)
          strip + reencode + burn (~12-20 hrs)
          4) Single Layer option 3: (2 DVD-R's)
          backup, separate, edit IFO files + reauthor + burn

    • Re:Dead Technology! (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Trejkaz ( 615352 )
      Or alternatively, they might upgrade the firmware to support dual layer so you can burn some disks at high speed and dual layer disks at a lower speed.

  • I'll take it (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Tmurder ( 661223 ) on Sunday May 09, 2004 @07:35PM (#9102813)
    This will inevitably drive the price of the other plextor dvd burners(708a, 504a, etc) and subsequently other 8x burners down, i'll take that. Can't beat plextor quality especially when the price will drop a bit. I'll be perfectly happy with a 8x burner.
    • Ok, I'll add my 2 cents.

      I'm not impressed by Plextor anymore. I've had two of their SCSI CD units die on me within the past couple of years. One was a plain Plextor SCSI CD-ROM drive, which experienced only light use, and died after about a year and a half after purchase. I was so annoyed I never bothered to send it back under warranty. The other, which finally died yesterday after months of intermittent hardware errors, was a SCSI CD-RW (Plexwriter 4/12/32) drive. Again, it had only experienced ligh

  • Yeah but no double Layer support (Score:5, Informative)

    by ArcticCelt ( 660351 ) on Sunday May 09, 2004 @07:37PM (#9102828)
    Double layer support [com.com] (8.5 GB) is the hot thing to come for DVD's and without this, there is no way this thing will be a success.

  • Nice, but (Score:5, Funny)

    by dbretton ( 242493 ) on Sunday May 09, 2004 @07:41PM (#9102845) Homepage

    If it's not Dual Layer, then it's just not cutting edge for the "/." crowd.

    Now, if the drive was DL AND 12x DVD+R AND could perform a 34 priority crawl of the internet for Natalie Portman pics AND burn them to media automatically, then, AND ONLY THEN, would it be a "/."-worty article.

  • SATA version too (Score:5, Informative)

    by stubear ( 130454 ) on Sunday May 09, 2004 @07:44PM (#9102871)
    They have a Serial ATA version [plextor.com] as well. I'm looking at getting this one now that I'm addicted to SATA. It's super fast and easy to hook up drives, what more coudl you want?

  • My G4 burns 4xDVD-R at 1x - ouch (Score:5, Informative)

    by Basehart ( 633304 ) on Sunday May 09, 2004 @07:58PM (#9102921)
    My G4 is writing 2 minute videos to 4xDVD-R's as I write this and it turns out the recent firmware "update" to the Pioneer superdrive means that 4x disks now write at 1x, which makes me realize yet again that I MUST READ THE READ ME's before buying a 50 pack of 4x blank DVD-R media.

    Hopefully Apple will start making faster DVD burners standard in their G5's very soon now!
    • Can't you just swap out the drive? If I recall correctly, the SuperDrive is just a DVR-103 or DVR-104 (both Pioneer OEM drives as you said), depends on the model of SuperDrive, I think.

      I do recall some software being able to write only to the SuperDrive, but I thought that was "fixed" somewhere along the line.

      However, I have the Pioneer DVR-A04 (in my PC), and I feel your pain. With the newer firmwares, I can't write to a 4x DVD-R at all, it seems. Could be the discs mind you, but I've been hearing rum

  • Woohoo (Score:4, Funny)

    by lewko ( 195646 ) on Sunday May 09, 2004 @09:55PM (#9103431) Homepage
    Now I can produce drink coasters even faster!

  • Plextor drives are good (Score:4, Informative)

    by Doug Neal ( 195160 ) on Sunday May 09, 2004 @10:12PM (#9103517)
    Plextor have always had a pretty good reputation for CD and DVD drives.. my dad bought their 8x drive recently and I was extremely impressed with it. Absolutely rock solid performance, extremely fast for reading (best digital audio extraction I've seen, ever) - and the bundled software is cool too. None of the usual buggy useless bloatware crap you get with most hardware, it's a neat unobtrusive tool that sits in the systray, but lets you tweak all aspects of the drive's performance, and lets you burn audio and data CDs/DVDs, even with Ogg Vorbis support for ripping and burning! (that really suprised me)

    So yeah, well done Plextor :)

  • Marketing (Score:3, Funny)

    by Bugmaster ( 227959 ) on Monday May 10, 2004 @02:24AM (#9104476) Homepage
    Haha I love their marketing. One of the features is,
    Black CD tray minimizes jitter
    How does it do that, exactly ?

  • SATA version (Score:3, Interesting)

    by jabuzz ( 182671 ) on Monday May 10, 2004 @04:13AM (#9104758) Homepage
    Apart from it not being dual layer capable, so more or less dead in the water, there is also a 712SA version which has a Serial ATA interface. Finally a
    computer that does not need parallel ATA is a reality.

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