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Data Storage Hardware

24x DVD Burners Hit the Market 140

Posted by timothy from the break-the-news-gently-to-your-cd-r-drive dept.
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."
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24x DVD Burners Hit the Market More

24x DVD Burners Hit the Market

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  • Standards do that... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Darkness404 ( 1287218 ) on Sunday March 08, 2009 @06:47PM (#27115787)

    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.

    • Re:Standards do that... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by tomhudson ( 43916 ) <barbara@hudson.barbara-hudson@com> on Sunday March 08, 2009 @08:01PM (#27116411) Journal

      DVDs have enough storage for just about everything

      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.

      • I have found there is little use for full drive backups for a few reasons. A) All of my music is transfered to my iPod so already there is double redundancy B) All my pictures are also on various memory cards C) I use Linux so restoring all my OS minus the data that is already backed up is trivial D) A home directory backup is all that is ever necessary. And so yes, all that other stuff does fit within 4 gigs of space, perhaps I just don't have a lot of files, but also most of the people who I have done com

        • Installing the OS isn't the problem with linux, it's all the updates, which isn't so trivial.

          Also, you forgot to back up /etc, /srv, and /var, as well as /usr/local. Hope you weren't running any databases, local copies of web apps, an svn repository, etc.

          • Actually, as I do none of the above, no data would have been lost. And while it is true about the updates, as I use Ubuntu there is a new version every 6 months, meaning that at most I have to install about 5 months worth of updates which isn't so bad considering my HDs don't fail every 6 months.
        • My home directory is currently just over 170 gigs. And that's only because I regularly purge old records.

        • And so yes, all that other stuff does fit within 4 gigs of space, perhaps I just don't have a lot of files, but also most of the people who I have done computer work for have similarly few files.

          That's not the norm for most people I know. Most of them will break 4 gigs easily on just music. I already know several people buying TV shows off iTunes now and those alone for the hi-def versions are close to 1GB per episode.

          Hell my PERSONAL data beyond OS is well over a terabyte now. I know I'm not the norm, but PLENTY of people are still well past a few DVD's for backing up all their data. Not to mention that with time the number of people in the group, and their total data storage needs, will defin

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Reziac ( 43301 ) *

            Last time I did a backup to DVD, I went thru an entire 100-unit spindle. At which point I decided this was for the birds. The fact is, reasonably-priced and consumer-friendly backup methods just don't keep up with data volume, and never have. :(

            The current answer seems to be multiple HDs of similar size -- fortunately current pricing makes that a more attractive alternative. But they still lack durable-portability, in that if you drop that backup HD, it may well be headcrashed and therefore toast (or at lea

      • It's not like Blu-Ray is going to be a good alternative either.

  • Just like CDs they are still popular and relevant. I'm personally not too excited about BD and seems the market is equally not excited.
    It took the now cheaper more ubiquitous USB flash to kill floppy disks. I remember them still being in fashion 5 years ago. And it will be long before a USB flash becomes a metaphor for saving.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Flash memory might actually be a much better format than even BluRay for both movies and backup/archival.

      Many BluRay players have a USB port now, and 16GB flash drives are in the sub 4000 yen ($40?) range now. For backup, flash seems like it's probably quite a reliant format (largely immune to thinks like magnetic fields, temperature, water etc) and although many manufacturers list a 10 year data retention time, that is without re-writing the data which "refreshes" it.

  • ... the question isn't whether the LiteOn or Sony is first but will either run on Vista?

    Sorry, it just had to be asked.

  • make bad discs faster (Score:5, Insightful)

    by frovingslosh ( 582462 ) on Sunday March 08, 2009 @06:54PM (#27115865)

    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.

    • I hear that using a platinum-iridium SATA cable by Monster for the low low price of $3800/in reduces the number of burning errors and increases the lifespan of your burned media too.

  • Who cares? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 08, 2009 @06:58PM (#27115897)

    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)

      by DurendalMac ( 736637 ) on Sunday March 08, 2009 @07:03PM (#27115925)
      Precisely. There are already 22x burners on the market. Hell, most DVD-R discs don't go above 16x anyway. What a yawn of a story.

      • If you watch burn process in Roxio Toast, you will be even more surprised. If you set it to max speed like 16x, it hits 16x only at certain parts (I guess the end) of DVD-R, not the entire process is 16x. It shows the live speed of burning, I guess Windows Nero does too.

        If this thing mentioned requires special disks, they will be expensive as hell just like DVD-R DL, it really hurts to see DVD dual layer price while all your drives are dual layer capable and you have files/movies to burn.

        They should have in

    • I suppose it's worth it if you're burning discs all day for your job, just like you might find it worth your while to choose one computer over another because its CPU is 10% faster.

    • Producing 100 copies of something is about the only thing I've used my DVD burners for. My last two laptops have come with them, and I've used them for burning lots of copies of video editing projects for distributing to people, but I've never used them as a mechanism for data transfer. With USB flash drives so cheap and convenient, I doubt I will. If UDF write support had been added to mainstream operating systems sooner, so you could use CDs and DVDs like floppy disks, then it might have been different

  • Catch-up! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by tomm3h ( 1406683 ) on Sunday March 08, 2009 @07:05PM (#27115939)

    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?

    • If you have 2 TB you need to back up, then optical media is not the right solution. You need another array of disks (or a single disk), and rsync (or something similar). Optical media might be a good solution for you to back up only your more important files. If they are all more important, then it just won't work well. I remember when CDs were almost as big as my hard drive, but those days are over.

    • you cannot ignore the drm in BD. each drive, blank (etc) contains an 'I ok this' vote to sony.

      I DO NOT OK THIS!

      so I won't buy BD. I don't condone the whole BD double-protection thing and each time you buy, you send the wrong message to sony.

      boycott bad standards. I know, you like storage but this isn't the only way to have density.

      • you cannot ignore the drm in BD. each drive, blank (etc) contains an 'I ok this' vote to sony.

        So did Compact Disc (at least until the patents ran out). CD uses EFM encoding [wikipedia.org] in the physical layer, and DVD uses a minor improvement on EFM.

    • You can get a hard drive and back it up for cheaper and at faster speeds. Plus it is likely (if you go USB) that you will be able to take it with you to any computer without the need to check for blu-ray.

    • Sony and the other Japanese companies will get on this eventually. You can already buy writeable Blu-Ray discs at most Japanese convenience stores for about $9.

  • Writable DVD is trash anyways (Score:4, Interesting)

    by gweihir ( 88907 ) on Sunday March 08, 2009 @07:19PM (#27116083)

    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: (Score:3, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward

      If your post is anything to go by, maybe the data wasn't corrupted, maybe you just didn't spell anything write in the first place.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by antdude ( 79039 )

      How about DVD-RW and DVD+RW? I would love to use those dual layer types so I can reuse the media like the old disks and CD-RW days.

    • I don't know what sort of problems that you dealt with, but I haven't had a problem writing DVDs that some people seem to.

      But I too am not so concerned about how quickly data can be burned, I usually write at a rate a lot slower than the max the media is rated for. I haven't bought fancy high quality media, but I didn't buy any store brand media either. I haven't had anyone tell me that a disc I give them is unreadable.

      I just tried a couple pieces of the oldest DVD writables that I could find, a six year

      • The media you use makes a huge difference. The first spindle I bought had about a 10% success rate. They all appeared to burn correctly, but then failed to verify. With the same burner, the second spindle I bought worked perfectly until I'd burned about 5 disks and the drive had heated up. Leaving it to cool for ten minutes made it work again.

    • What do you mean by "not very good"?

      I like some aspects of DVD-RAM for video use (i.e. essentially videotape replacement), though admittedly because of loading times in my consumer level hard drive/DVD recorder, I have been using DVD-RW more often. But reading the wikipedia about DVD-RAM and its purported higher reliability is interesting:
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dvd-ram [wikipedia.org]

  • Maybe with new 24x drives we may finally be able to burn a disk at more than 4x speed and get a disc that works.
    • This sounds like a computer speed issue... Older computers are not able to keep up with the burns and thus the cache is emptied and you get an error.
  • If you need physical media, flash drives are by far superior anyway. I ONLY use dvds for boot devices nowadays.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by tepples ( 727027 )

      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: (Score:2)

        by adolf ( 21054 )

        Bah.

        I used to have low-end RCA DVD player. It upscaled to 1080i via HDMI, it played random DIVX and MPEG movies from flash, and it worked well with every TV I ever connected it to. Video quality was good -- I kept it around until I got a PS3 and wanted to decrease the number of components next to the TV.

        It was $50 at Wal-Mart.

        It doesn't have to be high-end.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by tepples ( 727027 )

          I used to have low-end RCA DVD player. It upscaled to 1080i via HDMI, it played random DIVX and MPEG movies from flash, and it [...] was $50 at Wal-Mart.

          At this point, I'm almost jealous that you found the right make and model. Is it still made?

          • Costco has a Philips DVP5592 player that is DivX-certified, has a USB2.0 port, and upscales to 1080p via HDMI. $40 over Thanksgiving, and it's $50 now.

            I plug a external 300GB hard drive to it. That's over 400 movies @ 700MB each. They look decently enough even on my 46" plasma.

            Can't wait until the BD players come down in price so I can play my h264's without a PC.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by adolf ( 21054 )

            Doubt it. It's been at least two years since I bought that player, and given that it seemed to be a Wal-Mart exclusive, I'd be really surprised if it's still available.

            As another poster suggested, though: The player I used before that was a Philips model. It was more money (about $90), but it was a little fancier and a couple of years prior to the RCA that I had. It also worked fine with whatever media, as long as I stuffed it onto disc first (it had no support for USB or flash).

            IIRC, it had some nomenc

      • That's pretty much the only thing I've ever used a DVD burner for; burning videos I've edited for playback without a computer. As a removable media format for general data use, it failed. For small files (under 50MB or so globally, under a few GB locally) a network is more convenient. For larger files, flash drives are more convenient.

  • I guess people are making seriously hardcore DVDs with this thing. I mean, most of my DVDs are just three X's, which is plenty for my needs...

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