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Data Storage Hardware

First 16x DVD+R Recording Tests Available 236

Posted by timothy from the buncha-freaks dept.
An anonymous reader submits "CD Freaks.com has made a first preview of 16x DVD recording. Many people wondered if 16x DVD recording would be too fast and data could not be delivered by the hard disk. The first tests show that this is not a real problem. 16x DVD recording means that a DVD disk is written in about 6 minutes . The test drive, a BenQ DW1600, also supports dual layer writing and writing at 16x to 8x media."
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First 16x DVD+R Recording Tests Available More

First 16x DVD+R Recording Tests Available

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  • Typo? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by lancomandr ( 785360 ) *
    "The test drive, a BenQ DW1600 also supports dual layer writing and writing to 16x at 8x media."

    Last time I checked I couldn't write to 16x itself at any speed of media.

  • Ahem (Score:5, Funny)

    by The-Bus ( 138060 ) on Monday June 07, 2004 @08:43PM (#9361882)
    I've already overclocked my DVD burner. It now burns stuff I haven't even downloaded yet.

  • Yes, but.... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by ikkonoishi ( 674762 ) on Monday June 07, 2004 @08:45PM (#9361893) Journal
    I doubt I could play UT while burning to a DVD at 16x.

    You would need basically a dedicated machine for DVD burning at that speed.

    • Re:Yes, but.... (Score:5, Funny)

      by damiangerous ( 218679 ) <1ndt7174ekq80001@sneakemail.com> on Monday June 07, 2004 @08:50PM (#9361928)
      Or you could, you know, maybe stop playing UT for the six minutes it takes to burn a DVD at that speed.

      • Re:Yes, but.... (Score:5, Funny)

        by kfg ( 145172 ) on Monday June 07, 2004 @09:06PM (#9362017)
        Good Lord man! The average person will pass out after only two minutes of not playing UT and it takes years of training to go as long as five.

        Expecting the average Joe to stop for six is simply absurd.

        KFG
      • I am not sure where they got the 7 minute figure. It takes me 7ish mins to burn a dvd with 8x.

        Maybe they are talking about dual layer. which would make sense if not for the fact that it cannot write dual layer discs at 16x...only 2.4x infact.

        Either way...22mb/sec should be reachable by anyone with a hdd made wihtin the last few years. Most hdds can do over 40mb/sec sustainable (sequential read, which a dvd is), so only taking half that should not be a problem.

    • Re:Yes, but.... (Score:3, Interesting)

      by WiPEOUT ( 20036 )
      ... or a box with either a SCSI drive or dual CPUs ... or one of the upcoming dual-core CPUs and/or the next generation of SATA which should support command queueing and re-ordering.

  • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Good for them (Score:5, Interesting)

    by huber ( 723453 ) on Monday June 07, 2004 @08:45PM (#9361897)
    they had an SATA raid 0 array. What about us people whos boxen still only has a single ata 100 or 133?

    • Re:Good for them (Score:5, Interesting)

      by forkazoo ( 138186 ) <wrosecrans AT gmail DOT com> on Monday June 07, 2004 @09:12PM (#9362046) Homepage
      Well, first off, "boxen have" .. "a box has." But, I'm not a grammar nazi. :)

      Only ATA 133? I work at a computer store, and I get plenty of people with PII's and low spec PIII's coming in all the time who want to make DVD's. The salesman five years ago told them that the computer was very fast, so they typically accuse me of being just a damned liar when I tell them it may not work very well. Oh, and most home users have HP Pavillions and E-Machines and shit like that. You ever benchmark the drives in the super-cheap consumer systems? The drive diagnostic program we use at the shop can usually get ~5 MB/sec out of an E-machines. That's going to RAM, not another drive.

      A lot of people won't be able to use the 16 X features of this drive. OTOH, it probably has a larger buffer than a cheap 2.4x drive, so it will probably burn better at 1x than the old drives.

    • Re:Good for them (Score:3, Informative)

      by Bios_Hakr ( 68586 )
      Look at the peak transfer rate of your device and decide if it can keep up with a 16x drive.

      I have a single SATA 10k Raptor. It sustains between 40MB/s and 55MB/s depending on which tool I'm using to check. The slowest part of the drive still sustains 35MB/s.

      Most ATA100/133 hard drives sustain 25MB/s to 40MB/s. Even my external enclosure can sustain 20MB/s.

      I have used SATA and ATA RAID0 in the past. I'm not really impressed with it. The benchmarks show a doubling of transfer, but load times (esp in
      • I've found that while Raid0 can be nice to show off a benchmark, these so called Raid controllers on motherboards these days are kinda quirky.

        Back when Yuri's Revenge was out (command & conquer series), when I played on my machine with the onboard raid controller enabled (for all drives in the system), the game would actually hiccup. I found out that this was from the "software raid" driver eating up CPU that would normally go to the game.

        As well, when you do Raid0, if you don't have identical disks

      • Re:Good for them (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Doppler00 ( 534739 )
        The benchmarks show a doubling of transfer, but load times (esp in BF1942) only drop by about 10%.

        Then obviously, BF1942 loading maps is CPU or memory bound, not disk bound.

        Hmm... since you mentioned that, maybe I shouldn't spend the money on a two drive 10,000RPM SATA RAID0 array...

  • 8x vs 16x (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Coneasfast ( 690509 ) on Monday June 07, 2004 @08:45PM (#9361898)
    what is the real difference between 16x discs and 8x discs? what physically makes it writeable at one speed but not another? i've wondered about this for CD's too.

    is it just a marketing thing or what?

    • Re:8x vs 16x (Score:4, Informative)

      by Crazy_MYKL ( 721064 ) on Monday June 07, 2004 @08:51PM (#9361931)
      It's mostly marketing, those are rated speeds, so if you burn above those and bad things happen, the company isn't responsible. But it SHOULD work with lower rated discs.

    • Re:8x vs 16x (Score:3, Informative)

      by DrLZRDMN ( 728996 )
      sometimes, spining a cd to fast will warp the disk causeing an uneven burn or even break it so if the increase the speed sturdier disks have to be made, but I think for only double the spead it shouldn't affect it to much.

      • Re:8x vs 16x (Score:3, Interesting)

        by wo1verin3 ( 473094 )
        Actually there is a little more then that when it comes to CD-RW (most) and DVD discs. Drives actually detect what speed the media is rated at, so if you have a 1x DVD-R disc, you can only write to it at 1x, other speed options will be unavailable.

    • Re:8x vs 16x (Score:2, Informative)

      by Laebshade ( 643478 )
      The difference, though I am not an expert by any means, between 8x and 16x dvd+r (or 32x and 48x cdrs) is the guaranteed labeled quality. You are guaranteed by the company who makes the medium that it is capable of being burned and read at said speed.

      That doesn't mean it can't be written at higher than said guaranteed rate; on the contrary, I have cdrs that are guaranteed to write/read up to 48x, but I write all of them at 52x.

    • Re:8x vs 16x (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Pooua ( 265915 ) on Tuesday June 08, 2004 @03:06AM (#9363643) Homepage
      As I understand it, the main difference in writing speeds between various types of optical media is the dye formulation used in the media.

      "To achieve 2.4x high-speed writing, Verbatim DVD+R utilises a patented Metal Azo dye as the recording layer."

      Verbatim: Verbatim Announces 4.7GB DVD+R Discs [verbatim.com.au]

  • in that if you burn at a faster rate than a different reader can read, the DVD cannot be read. I know a while back when I had a blazing 2x cd ROM, my friend burned me something on a 4x, but alas, I couldn't read it. Needless to say I was pissed...
    DVDs probably work the same way, in which case, the faster burn may only be so useful, but I am probably wrong on that.

    • Re:Do DVDs work like CDs (Score:5, Funny)

      by ahaning ( 108463 ) on Monday June 07, 2004 @08:53PM (#9361951) Homepage Journal
      Heh. Things have progressed a bit since the 2x CD-R days. What probably happened was that your drive just wasn't able to distinguish the pits in the CD your friend burned.

      I have an older (5-6 years old) laptop whose CD-ROM drive can't read all the discs I burn. It can read most any silver that I give it, though. I'm guessing it's just that the laser isn't able to "see" the pits my CDRW burns (it's an 8x4x32, so it's rather old, too.)

      BTW, if you burn audio discs at 16x, do they play at that speed? ;-)

    • Re:Do DVDs work like CDs (Score:4, Informative)

      by noda132 ( 531521 ) on Monday June 07, 2004 @08:57PM (#9361974) Homepage

      in that if you burn at a faster rate than a different reader can read, the DVD cannot be read. I know a while back when I had a blazing 2x cd ROM, my friend burned me something on a 4x, but alas, I couldn't read it. Needless to say I was pissed...

      No, and CDs don't work like that either. The situation you describe was an isolated incident. Even a 1x DVD reader (e.g., a DVD player) can read a 16x-burned CD. In fact, there should be no physical difference between a DVD burned at 1x and one burned at 16x.

      • Grandparent is *not* an isolated incident. (Score:5, Insightful)

        by The Darkness ( 33231 ) on Monday June 07, 2004 @09:33PM (#9362146) Homepage
        No, and CDs don't work like that either.

        Sorry to burst your bubble, but they most certainly do.

        It most certainly could be that an old drive can't read discs burned by newer, faster drives. The older drives may be less fault tolerant. Pre-pressed discs could be ok but a disc burned too fast could have pits just slightly too close together or too far apart that confuse the older drive.

        I have seen this happen with CDs on more than one occasion. Slowing down the burn speed made a disc usable by the older drive. Think PSX backups.

        In fact, there should be no..

        Should being the key word.
        A Wise man whose name I can't remember once said: In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is.

        • Re:Grandparent is *not* an isolated incident. (Score:4, Interesting)

          by Alioth ( 221270 ) <no@spam> on Tuesday June 08, 2004 @05:54AM (#9364088) Journal
          IIRC, the reason your old CD drive might not read a CD-R burned at high speed is because the new high speed writers use CAV (constant angular velocity - i.e. the disk RPM remains the same regardless of whether you're writing a track near the hub or near the edge). Older CD drives may not be able to do CAV since the CD standard is for CLV (constant linear velocity - the bit of disk right over the head is always going the same speed relative to the read head, hence the disk is spun faster on tracks near the hub and spun slower on tracks near the edge).
    • Are you sure the 2x drive couldn't read CDs burned at 4x or could it just not read anything written to a burned CD?

      Very important distinction to make.

  • The need for speed (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Slayer_X ( 141736 )
    Man, wait some months and u can obtain the uber DVD-burner at XX mega-hyper-speed.

    Is really a need to have the last toy in hardware?

    Don't waste your money :-D

    "saludos"

    • Re:The need for speed (Score:5, Insightful)

      by FlipmodePlaya ( 719010 ) on Monday June 07, 2004 @09:08PM (#9362028) Journal
      I jumped on the CDR bandwagon a bit early, and god burned by it. The drive I bought ruined discs far too often, in the days where they weren't $.20 a piece. Yet there was no hope for a return, because that was the 'nature of CD burning'. I won't make the same mistake with DVD burners, I advise all to wait a year or two.

      • Re:The need for speed (Score:5, Funny)

        by mblase ( 200735 ) on Monday June 07, 2004 @09:38PM (#9362173)
        I jumped on the CDR bandwagon a bit early, and god burned by it.

        Perhaps if you hadn't been stealing music or archiving pr0n, God wouldn't have felt it necessary to smite you with fire for your actions.
      • We are already at dual-layer and 16x speeds. I think the wait is over. I have an optorite dvd burner that does +r and -r and i got it for 150$ half a year ago. Remember how long it took for cd burners to get down to that price? Id say DVD burners are progressing really fast, and for the price there is really no reason to wait. There is plenty of software out for movie authoring, and now that dual-layer blanks are available, pretty much any disc can be duplicated. Sure I wish my burner was dual-layer, but Id

      • Re:The need for speed (Score:3, Informative)

        by WiPEOUT ( 20036 )
        Note to mods: the above should have been moderated Interesting, not Insightful.

        His historical anecdote about problems with CD-R devices at a time when there was little mainstream laser-recording manufacturing has little relevance today. In those days, a CD-R drive cost US$1,000, attempted to write at 150KB/s and burned coasters if you sneezed, the wind changed, or the CD fairy decided to have fun.

        Today, DVD+/-R/RW drives have been around for years, and you can get a top-of-the-line drive for US$80 that wr

    • Wait (Score:2)

      by Stevyn ( 691306 )
      Isn't hardware going to be free pretty soon though?

  • Finally... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 07, 2004 @08:46PM (#9361904)
    My porn backups will be able to keep up with my downloads...

  • The Best Part? (Score:4, Funny)

    by wandernotlost ( 444769 ) <slashdot@trailmagi c . com> on Monday June 07, 2004 @08:49PM (#9361924)
    At the end of the page:

    "It is not possible to react on this item."

  • Data from HD no problem.... With Raid 0 (Score:5, Insightful)

    by CtrlPhreak ( 226872 ) on Monday June 07, 2004 @08:54PM (#9361954) Homepage
    Come on guys, not everyone has raid with two fast drives, last I'd checked a lot of consumer pcs still ship with 5400 drives. This bottleneck may indeed be a problem with burning 16x dvds on the average system.

  • Physical limits of the medium a factor. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by cascino ( 454769 ) on Monday June 07, 2004 @09:04PM (#9362007) Homepage
    With CDs having reached (essentially) the physical limits of the media at 52x burning speed - it is my understanding the discs will destruct at higher RPM's - has the speed of DVD burning neared its physical limit as well?
    A quick back-of-the-envelope calculation tells me that DVDs shouldn't be burnable much faster than 16x... does anyone know anything more about this? Maybe DVDs are more durable than CDs?

    • DVDs aren't more durable, but... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by drewhearle ( 753120 ) on Monday June 07, 2004 @09:42PM (#9362191) Homepage Journal
      The physical limits of CD burning (the speeds that often cause shattering) aren't because CDs are easily breakable. It's because CDs are imperfectly manufactured, and therefore imbalanced - a CD spinning at 52x that isn't perfectly round will be wobbling with an incredible amount of force.

      So... for DVDs to be able to spin at faster speeds, the discs (and drives) will have to be manufactured to very high specs. Very slight variations in the roundness of the disc would cause enough vibration to break the disc. A non-round or off-center hole in the middle would also cause this problem.

      • I recall reading that a major contributor to optical media fatigue is crystalization of the plastic. The faster the disk spins, the more intense the laser beam must be, so the dye can be converted in a shorter time. This more intense laser beam also heats the plastic, which causes some structural change in the plastic. When the plastic cools, some of it crystalizes. Crystaline plastic is fragile. At the high stress of modern drive speeds (a CD spinning at 48x is spinning at 200 miles per hour on its outer e
      • Perhaps this [powerlabs.org] will change your mind on the strength of polycarbonate.
        Bear in mind that a CD at 52x spins at 10900rpm.
        The old PS1 discs would sometimes explode. And not explode as in crack, explode as in cd-drive-faceplate-on-the-other-side-of-the-room.
    • I know DVDs are spec'd to higher tolerances, but i havn't seen a dvd reader above 16x, and my 3 year old compaq has one. And 52x is a bit past the limit on CDs sometimes.

  • Ewww, BenQ (Score:5, Informative)

    by Dark Lord Seth ( 584963 ) on Monday June 07, 2004 @09:06PM (#9362014) Journal

    Horrible 'brand'. Once worked in a computer store for a while. We sold about 20 of their TFTs before we figured out that the three we had on display were showing serious signs of wear. After being on display for just two months. That, coupled with the two we already sent back for replacement, ( One simply didn't work, another one auto-adjusted the screen about 15cm too far to the right. ) make me glad I wasn't working there anymore when all those BenQ monitors started to fail on our customers.

    Anyways, let BenQ take the brunt of a new tech. If I'd want a 16x dvd+-rw drive so badly, I'd wait for very good quality ( Plextor ) or a good medium between quality and price. ( NEC ) And yes, those of you who are interested can take that as a hint.

    • Re:Ewww, BenQ (Score:3, Insightful)

      by ameoba ( 173803 )
      I doubt BenQ actually makes any of their own hardware; they probably just buy parts from some Taiwanese company nobody's ever heard of and put it into a BenQ box.

    • Re:Ewww, BenQ (Score:2, Interesting)

      by shepd ( 155729 )
      BenQ is/was Acer. The proud manufacturers of old Apple laptops.

      Let me just put it this way: Budget prices, budget brand, budget use. >:-D

      We bought a couple of hundred 56i Acer monitors for labs at my old college. I do believe the failure rate approached 99%. In the end, a special deal was made so that the wholesaler could work on the warranty situation. All in all, it kept me busy! :-D
      • That explains a whole lot. The only other manufacturer I could think of with such a failure rate was Acer... and I didn't remember if they made anything anymore, since their old stuff ssssssucked.

      • Re:Ewww, BenQ (Score:2, Informative)

        by FRiC ( 416091 )
        BenQ was split off from Acer, but they're completely different companies. The Acer group also includes AOpen, Apacer, etc.

        BenQ was trying to take over Acer a few months ago...

    • Re:Ewww, BenQ (Score:2, Informative)

      by number ( 309649 )
      I must admit I'm a tad skeptical of BenQ's manufacturing quality, but on one occasion they have come through for me.

      Right now I'm reading this post back on a 15" BenQ FP557s LCD monitor I bought for $145 refurbished - no dead pixels, still running like a champ after 8 or so months (cheapest search now shows it going for ~$280). Sure it was a gamble buying a refurbed LCD without seeing it first, but it sure paid off for me!
    • Not having had any direct experience with their monitors I can't comment, but I tend to use BenQ and Lite-On almost exclusively for my cd/dvd burners and media. My coaster rate when using BenQ has been far lower (almost zero) than any others I use.

  • just a question (Score:5, Funny)

    by louden obscure ( 766926 ) on Monday June 07, 2004 @09:13PM (#9362052)
    am i gonna need a kevlar blanket to drape over my damn box just in case a faulty disc explodes?

  • who cares?

    6 minutes, 30 minutes, an hour, does it matter?

    how often do people burn an entire DVD? If you burn so many that speed matters you probably shouldn't be using a consumer solution anyway.
    • how often do people burn an entire DVD?

      Any time anybody wants to back up a sizeable portion of their system. Which people ought to be doing fairly regularly, right? ;o)
      If you burn so many that speed matters you probably shouldn't be using a consumer solution anyway.

      You might have a point here... though it's not that "lost time" that matters. It's the perception of that lost time that matters. Nobody I know says "Oh, it's 'bout time I backed up my system. Let's go eat lunch while the DVD burns." Inst
    • If I burn even 1 DVD, the 20 minutes I save by cutting my burning time from 30 minutes to 10 is 20 minutes I can do something else -- like not waste time in front of my PC making backups.

      Even if I only burn, say, 30 DVDs a year, that's 10 hours of my spare or working time that pay for the US$30 price difference.

      I'll take the spare hours, thanks.
      • that you can spend an extra 20 minutes working? I think it's time to bust out the 2x cd-rws for my 80 gig drive...
      • So you actually sit infront of your computer staring at the writing progress during the 30 minutes it takes to write a DVD? Don't you go away and do something else? Or don't you leave the writing process in the background and get on with something else? Theres no reason you cant continue doing other things while a dvd is burning.. the world doesn't stop!

    • Uh, how about no... (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Cyno01 ( 573917 )
      Me and some friends of mine did a short movie [hoodlumzproductions.com] and did a run of about 100 copies. It took us about 50 hours total, just burning. I dont know how much having a small run like that pressed would cost, but i'm sure its more than the cost of 100 DVDs and our time (which is obviously worthless). But yeah, it woulda been nice to save some time.
      • You could put in a second DVD burner? Or hire a DVD-write replicator? There are machines that automatically write the same content automatically on a large batch of DVD-R discs, so the manual disc exchange isn't necessary.

        Anyway, I'm not against the faster drives if that means I can still somehow operate them at slower speeds, but other than Nero's stupid slow-down utility, I don't know how. I hated the 50x and faster CD-R drives because they were so dang loud and barely amounted to a noticible differen
    • Me? I do quite a bit of amateur video editing and it takes me about 40 minutes to burn a DVD on my PowerBook. Doing a complete run (in the machine's idle time, when I'm reading or watching TV) takes up to a week depending on how many copies I need. Having one of these in a FireWire enclosure would make a lot of difference to that.
    • how often do people burn an entire DVD?

      FYI, I am scanning my old family photographs from negatives, and one batch resulted in files that are 80 Meg per photo. I could only fit 50 of these on a DVD (out of the 67 I scanned). I have hundreds of photos. I've also started shooting video on miniDV, which already could swamp my 250-Gig hard drive, much less my puny 4.7-Gig DVDs.

    • With Bit Torrent and a DSL line.. Plenty. heck just last night i burned 2 seasons of Enterprise to DVD and i have one more season to go.. not to mention other shows.

      Then theres my work. I'm a design student, and this semester alone my work came to over 6 GB and that is not including all the raw data i had to delete.

      Anyway, while not many peopel have work files that run into gigabytes, i'm sure we all download tonnes of stuff that we want to keep.

  • a summary (Score:5, Insightful)

    by vmircea ( 730382 ) <vmircea @ t jhsst.edu> on Monday June 07, 2004 @09:21PM (#9362089) Homepage
    Basically to give a little summary for people who like having information condensed into a readable form... of things you should know about this technology...

    1. Unless you have a smoking hard drive you're not gonna see 16X speeds (ATA hard drive? you wish)

    2. Unless your PC is relatively fast as well, in addition to a good deal of RAM (as in their test system) it's also not going to happen.

    3. And an IMPORTANT note: Don't get caught up in the craze of getting the newest thing, this will probably cost an unholy amount when it comes out, and the requirements will be really high, which will add to the price as well. I have a 4X DVDRW and although it isn't anywhere near as fast, I don't need godly system specs to use it. And neither do I need to drop anything else I'm doing. Also note that on a lesser system that they tested it with you will see significantly slower writing.

    Hope you found this helpful.

    • 1. Unless you have a smoking hard drive you're not gonna see 16X speeds (ATA hard drive? you wish)

      What is it about 20MB/s or so that you think is excessive? Hard drives that cost well under a hundred dollars for in excess of 100GB can easily feed that to a DVD drive on the other channel. We're talking $400 PCs.

    • Re:a summary (Score:2, Insightful)

      by sexecutioner ( 597887 )
      In response to point (2).

      You could also have 4GB of RAM (or so), and do the burn from there.

      Just a thought.
      • Well, since a single sided dvd is 4.4GB or so, and a double sided is twice that.. and you'd need some overhead for the OS.. You would _NEED_ a 64bit machine to do this properly.. and people said there was no need for 64bit machines!
    • Responding to your points:

      1. & 2. Many ordinary computer systems today can easily keep up with a 16x DVD burner. The burner, itself, may not be able to keep up with the system or its own burn speed. *cough* 2 Meg bugger *cough*

      3. We are talking about BenQ. I really doubt very much that this 16x BenQ drive will cost even as much as an 8x Plextor. In fact, what I think BenQ did was simply overclock an ordinary 8x drive. They did that before, with a 4x drive to make an 8x drive, and the crummy system

  • Average write speed under 12x? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Guspaz ( 556486 ) on Monday June 07, 2004 @09:23PM (#9362096)
    The average write speed on this drive barely qualifies it as a 12x drive. Claiming this is a 16x drive is silly.

    8x drives typically pull in average write speeds of 0.4 to 0.6 x lower than their rated spec (Like the 7.44x quoted in this article)... but THIS drive is pulling 4.7x lower than it's rated spec. It's burning at 11.32x... In my mind, that classifies this drive as a 12x, NOT a 16x.
    • Well, I don't think any 52x CD writer can write a 52 minute CD in one minute.

      In short, the drive manufacturers lie. When the drive speeds go up, RPMs go up, but they have to limit them otherwise imbalanced discs will shatter. RPMs being a limiter, they are effectively CAV drives, so the data can only be written so quickly near the center. Usually the stated write speed is only on the edge of the disc.
  • they have already reched this, and can basically burn at instantaneous speeds

    link HERE [google.com]

  • Where is SCSI devices nowadays. That was the greatest internal/external interface you can get. How it's just obsolete. There is a whole 2 brands of SCSI DVDs, all of which remain at $100+ since there is just no competition. Has anyone tried the SCSI-to-IDE converters?

    • Using a SCSI-IDE solution would make you lose out on the speed increases, if they existed. Check out some reviews of those Raptor SATA drives that run at 10k RPM, they've got almost identical speeds as SCSI.
    • What? You mean they've replaced MFM and RLL drives already?

      Hell, I hope my ESDI drive isn't rendered obsolete any time soon.

      Now where's that 128KB 8" hard-sectored floppy disk I use for backups?

  • damn (Score:2)

    by hawkbug ( 94280 )
    You know what, screw these fast speeds. I hate it. I burn my DVDs at 1x because the Sony Playstation and other stand alone dvd players barf on discs that are even burned at 2.4x or higher. 16x is just plain stupid, really stupid. What in the hell would use that for? You couldn't play it in an Xbox, PS2, or 90% of stand alone dvd players. Yeah yeah, I know - the disc type matters - but even the best discs barely read in my PS2 burned at 2.4x. Barely is being generous. What I REALLY want is the ability

  • 16x DVD = 21MB/s (roughly) (Score:3, Informative)

    by doormat ( 63648 ) on Monday June 07, 2004 @11:23PM (#9362788) Homepage Journal
    21MB/s isnt all that fast. The new WD SATA drives are from 35MB/s to 60MB/s. No, a 5400 drive wont cut it, but any 7200 drive made in the past 2 years should be good. See here [storagereview.com] and look at "WB99 Disk/Read Transfer Rate - End in MB/Sec".

  • Do These Numbers Look Right to You? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Pooua ( 265915 ) on Tuesday June 08, 2004 @03:37AM (#9363741) Homepage
    I am perplexed by the numbers given for this so-called, "16x" DVD burner. Let's start with the rated speeds, and compare it to my 2-month old Maddog 8x Dominator 6-in-1 Dual DVD burner.

    First, the BenQ:

    Writing DVD+R discs: 16x
    Writing DVD+RW discs: 4x
    Writing DVD+R Dual Layer discs: 2.4x
    Writing CD-R discs: 40x
    Writing CD-RW discs: 24x
    Reading DVD-Discs: 16x
    Reading CD-Discs: 40x
    Access time CD/DVD: 120ms
    Buffer: 2Mb

    Now, my Maddog:

    Writing DVD+/-R discs: 8x
    Writing DVD+/-RW discs: 4x
    Writing DVD+R Dual Layer discs: Unk*
    Writing CD-R discs: 32x
    Writing CD-RW discs: 16x
    Reading DVD-Discs: 12x
    Reading CD-Discs: 40x
    Access time CD/DVD: 110/130 ms
    Buffer: 2Mb

    As you can see, the specs show that my 8x Maddog is almost as fast as the 16x BenQ!

    Then, there is the statement in the review that says it only takes an average of about 6 minutes to burn a DVD at 16x (actually, average speed is only 11.32x). Compare this to the 8-to-9 minutes it takes to burn a DVD at 8x.

    These results are underwhelming. I would expect more from a 16x DVD burner.

    *Rumor on Usenet is that some DVD burners, such as the Pioneer A07 currently on the market, will be able to burn dual-layer DVDs with a simple firmware upgrade. Indeed, some of these models already *have* burned dual-layer in hacked versions. No word on where people got the dual-layer media.

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"The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts." -- Bertrand Russell

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