24x DVD Burners Hit the Market 140
KingofGnG writes "There is some uncertainty on which will be the one, between Sony Optiarc and Lite-On, to market the first drive of such kind, but the fact is that DVD burners will once again exceed the maximum write speed limit going from 22x to 24x. Both companies will release the new optical drives between March and May, and though in practice the speed difference isn't amazing at all, the new breakthrough shows that firms continue to invest in a technology with a surprisingly long life."
Standards do that... (Score:5, Insightful)
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)
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.
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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.
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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
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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
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It's not like Blu-Ray is going to be a good alternative either.
DVDs are here to stay (Score:1)
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.
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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.
24x is nice but... (Score:1, Funny)
... 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)
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.
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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.
these sentences, not this sentence (Score:2)
This sentence gave me a headache.
You quoted two sentences, not one. Are you trying to make things look worse than they are? Is a compound sentence really that hard for your brain?
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Luck?
Back in the day (a decade or so ago), I was the first kid on the block with an 8x Plextor SCSI CD burner. It was the fastest available at the time, aside from one released by Smart and Friendly just a few weeks earlier.
In the beginning, media was indeed a problem. A lot of blanks were still branded for 2x, most of them were 4x, and only a few were actually rated at 8x. Some had real issues, others seemed to work ok. After a semi-intensive study of different media, I found that silver (yes, silver -
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I've also never had a problem with CDs, but the issue is with DVDs. DVDs are much worse, presumably because of the higher data density.
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It isn't as simple as higher speed = poorer burn quality.
Check out CD Freaks, they have a lot of data on this sort of thing. For example, my Pioneer 16x DVD drive only burns 12x on most media, but a 12x burn is always better quality than an 8x burn. The method the drive uses to get 12x is simply better than the one it uses to get 8x, so on that drive burning at 12x is best.
This is quite often the case, as manufacturers tend to spend more time improving the maximum burn speeds for common media, rather than w
Who cares? (Score:4, Insightful)
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)
Dual Layer instead of 24x(!) (Score:2)
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
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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.
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Catch-up! (Score:3, Interesting)
I really wish they'd start investing in dragging the cost of next-generation media down. Blu-Ray is great if you ignore the DRM aspects.. Which for data backup renders it perfectly adequate.
Though I'd much rather see something with a little more than 50GB of storage... But then, if they spent their R&D money on perfecting/improving the multi-layer technology, we'd all be backing-up to n*25GB discs in no time.
Why waste all the research budget on ageing technology, when it takes a whole spindle of DVD-Rs to back-up my 2TB RAID array?
Optical disks are unlikely to ever again catch up (Score:1)
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When I had a 400MB hard disk, I had a tape drive and a 512MB tape to back up the entire hard disk. The system also had a (read only) CD drive, which made two removable media options for me that had larger capacity than my actual hard disk could contain.
How times have changed!
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I remember when I had two 40 MB hard drives (this was before CDs). My Dad told me stories about people with 200 MB hard drives, and I wondered what they could possibly do with all that extra space.
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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.
DVD has Sony patents too (Score:2)
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.
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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.
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Presumably you mean rewritable discs. At the moment, the cheapest BD-RE discs, at least available through Amazon seems to be about $7.87 apiece.
http://www.amazon.com/Memorex-32020013366-Rewriteable-Blu-Ray-Spindle/dp/B001B98F3I [amazon.com]
(I keep hoping eventually a standalone video recorder will show up with BluRay in it -- or at least a convenient way to put recordings from a Tivo on BluRay.)
Writable DVD is trash anyways (Score:4, Interesting)
Even DVD-RAM is not very good, as I found hwen evaluating 6 different media. I have no diea what people use these for, but backup, data storage and data exchange are all very bad ideas in this consumer-trash. Writing trash faster makes in not better at all.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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]
Disc error rates (Score:2)
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Feh (Score:1)
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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.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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
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No, not all PCs have S-Video output. (Score:2)
Or you can use a PC that already supports s-video, like every pc I've owned in the past decade, including laptops.
But the PC at the location may not be one that you've owned in the past decade. Case in point: I went in an Office Depot a couple months ago, and zero desktop PCs for sale came with S-Video output. And if you know the owner of the TV has a DVD player (more likely than an HTPC), it's still a lot less work to lug around a burned DVD in a keep case than an entire desktop PC. Even on laptops, S-Video isn't universal; neither my ASUS Eee PC 900 nor my cousin's Acer Aspire one has it.
24X? Wow... (Score:2)
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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Plz lower the cost of Blu-ray writers & media. Kthxbai!
Pricewatch lists a 2x BDRE 25GB 15 Disc Spindle @ ~$115.00.
15 * 25 = 375 GB
Price per Gigabyte = $/GB = 115/375 = $0.30 per GB.
Nothing to write home about yet, but at least it's coming down.
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We'll see the same thing we saw with CDs ... price goes through the floor, speed goes up and up, and then they simply become obsolete.
Same happened with zip drives ..
Same happened with floppy drives ...
Same is happening with DVD drives and, to a certain extent, with hard drives ...
Re:So last century! (Score:5, Informative)
When CD-ROMs were new, most people's hard drives were a fraction of what could be held on a CD. The first computer my family had with a CD drive had a 250 meg hard drive. When you could start burning CDs for realistic prices, the average hard drive was probably a few gigabytes; you could back up all your data on two or three CDs.
When DVD burners became available, hard drives were usually a few dozen GB; it took somewhere around 10 DVDs to back up all of your data.
When Blu-ray burners became available, it wasn't uncommon for hard drives to be 500 GB, so 20 Blu-rays to back up your data.
Yes, Blu-ray burners will become cheaper, and yes, blu-ray discs will become cheaper, but by the time they do, we'll be seeing 2 and 3TB hard drives for $100. The $/GB of Blu-ray might drop below hard drives for a while.
Then, hard drives will continue to advance with Moore's law, and by the time the next generation of optical discs come out (which will probably be 150 GB/layer, based on the ~5x ratio of each disc type to the previous), you'll be able to buy 2-digit terabyte hard drives for $100.
Conclusion: Blu-ray is already obsolete, at least for data archival. Hard drives are going to win for the next few years.
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Exactly. You can already get an external 1.5 TB hd for $130.00 - between hard drives and solid-state devices, conventional rotating optical media are caught between a rock and a hard place. Time to switch to 3D encoding, or forget about it entirely.
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There are only really two reasons left to use optical media: playback on stand-alone players and archival.
Playback is becoming less of an issue as network/usb capable players become available, but for a lot of people the simplicity of just inserting the relevant disc makes it worth the effort to burn one.
Archival is less clear. In theory good quality DVD media stored properly should be readable in 10 or 20 years time. The problem is that no-one really knows for sure. HDDs might actually be a better option.
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A bit optimistic ... I bought 2 seagates to do a raid1 - they were both defective, so I bought 2 more, and THEY were both defective. I'm on drives 12 through 14 (only one has lasted more than a week). It looks like ONE of those 3 is acceptable ...
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You're not supposed to archive data on optical disks anyway.
Re:Moore's Law (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Moore's Law (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Moore's Law (Score:5, Informative)
Not likely. It's tricky enough having one laser doing "burn-free" and picking up where it left off... It's not going to happen with multiple laser, let alone improve speeds.
You can rotate the laser, but then you have MANY problems to address. Highly precise hinged wire harnesses, an extremely heavy rotating mount that can keep the laser perfectly steady, and continual centripetal compensation as the laser lens moves to focus the beam.
It's possible, but very difficult.
And no, you can't just rotate it at 10,000 RPMs. The laser mechanism won't take the force any better than the discs do. It's technically possible, but would be ludicrously expensive.
And all for what? So you can buy one slightly faster disc burner, rather than hundreds of slightly slower disc burners, running in parallel.
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How about just tilting a mirror?
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It's not clear that it's even technically possible. Maybe if the mechanism was in a vacuum.
Ludicrous speed! Go!
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They tried that with CD readers long ago; I believe it was Kenwood CD-ROMs that had multiple lasers so different tracks could be read in parallel, allowing a higher bandwidth without having to rotate the disc any faster.
It died after a while. It probably simply cost too much, and people just weren't willing to pay that much so they could read CDs faster, when dirt-cheap 24x drives are available.
Re:Moore's Law (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, it was a single laser that was split into multiple beams.
The technology behind the Kenwood drives was developed by an Israeli startup called Zen Research (they had their logo on the drive).
The drive ended up more expensive than it had to, because they ended up using separate ICs for each beam due to a bug in their ASIC, preventing using the ASIC's internal logic that was supposed to do the same. They were already very late so they didn't respin the ASIC.
They worked on the same logic for a DVD writer, but they were so late that the company went belly-up.
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You mean move the laser? Why not create an optical device to deflect the beam? I am out of practice, but it seems this would be far easier. Maybe there is some reason mfgrs don't do this (my guess would be a patent holder wants huge fees), but I am sure you could achieve much higher speeds than physically spinning the disc or laser.
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You mean move the laser? Why not create an optical device to deflect the beam? I am out of practice, but it seems this would be far easier.
Seems to me there's two issues with that:
First, there's a precision issue, and a related reliability issue. If you're adjusting the laser (and sensor) angle using a rotating mirror, for instance, a small change in the mirror position corresponds to a relatively large change in the read position. The reliability issue is the increased probability that such a device would become misaligned, due to its higher sensitivity.
Second, for the laser to have a fairly perpendicular angle of incidence to the disc surf
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A little shame that 10,000 RPM would result in a 20x burner.
A 52x burner spins at 26,000 RPM.
For the record, I have had a new disc shatter while reading. It was a 52x reader, it managed to puncture a hole through the side of my aluminium CoolerMaster case.
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I was always under the impression that the 72x CD drives managed the feat not by spinning it faster but by reading multiple tracks concurently. Here is a bit from on review on the drive:
"Enter the technology developed by Zen. Instead of rotating the disc above and beyond the physical limits by some act of magic, they have devised a means to read seven tracks concurrently. Those seven streams of data flow through a specially designed RISC chip and to your computer with no additional CPU-load."
Thats from: http [pcstats.com]
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Well, in theory we could have 72x CD drives or even DVD drives, it's just that they're too expensive to make.
A few years ago there was a company called Zen Research who invented a tehnology called TrueX which used 7 read heads to read the disc and it reconstructed the data from all seven read heads in the drive's cache.
An actual CD-ROM drive that implemented this was Kenwood 72x (http://www.tweak3d.net/reviews/kenwood/72x/) but they chose to reduce the rotational speed instead of higher throughput (perhaps
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http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleid=339&page=2 [pcstats.com]
Enter the technology developed by Zen. Instead of rotating the disc above and beyond the physical limits by some act of magic, they have devised a means to read seven tracks concurrently. Those seven streams of data flow through a specially designed RISC chip and to your computer with no additional CPU-load.
The 72x CD drive is a lie. It's probably spinning at 40x speeds(or lower) - although as the sandra benchmarks show, if you have to read 7 tr
Re:Moore's Law (Score:5, Informative)
Why does Moore's Law not apply here?
Because every time you double the rotation speed, you increase the force on the DVD by a factor of four; which means that before long the disk simply tears itself apart.
In fact, I thought that was supposed to happen not much above 16x, so I'm surprised they've got it working this fast.
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Because every time you double the rotation speed, you increase the force on the DVD by a factor of four; which means that before long the disk simply tears itself apart.
I vaguely remember a Mythbusters episode on that. The CD literally exploded, and the shrapnel left a big freaking dent in the aluminium casing they put it in.
Re:Moore's Law (Score:5, Funny)
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Why not just power down?
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Methinks, you may have wanted to examine the quality of the cds you are using instead of the speed of the cd rom...
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The shrapnel also buried itself 1" into the gelatin dummy (who had the same resistance to penetration [gotta be a better term for this but you get the point] as human flesh).
IIRC, this occurred at ~300x.
I think GP is a little wrong on the 16x thing. The limitation has been making a high enough powered laser to heat the bits to 200C in the split second the bit is being written.
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Even 1X burners have the bit in the burn windows for a "split second" the problem is the faster you spin the more sloppy the burn looks. Take a CDR or DVDR and put it under a microscope to look. All DVD's I sell to customers are burned at 2X and no faster, they look clean compared to the smeared look of the 4X and 8X and higher DVD-R's that get burned. I also eliminated all defective disk complaints by doing that.
The faster yuo burn the more "sloppy" the burning is on the disk.
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The faster yuo burn the more "sloppy" the burning is on the disk.
The same could be said of typing...
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If I remember correctly, Mythbusters had to use rotational speeds that were several times what a real drive will do. 300x or so?
One night my girlfriend were sitting at our PCs, which were right next to each other. We heard a very loud, very sudden bang or pop noise out of nowhere. Looked at each other, and looked around the room and couldn't figure out what that noise was.
When we couldn't figure out what that loud noise was, we forgot about it, and figured that if it was important, we'd find it eventuall
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If I remember correctly, Mythbusters had to use rotational speeds that were several times what a real drive will do. 300x or so?
How new/high quality were the discs they were testing? A disc coming from a fresh cakebox is likely to do better than an old disc.
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Because Moore's law applies only to electronics (specifically, transistors) and not things with moving parts?
That's not totally unlike asking "Why does Moore's Law not apply to cars?"
Re:Roger Moore's Law (Score:2)
Because Moore's law applies only to electronics (specifically, transistors) and not things with moving parts?
That's not totally unlike asking "Why does Moore's Law not apply to cars?"
Probably there was a time when cars followed a similar pattern of growth...
Moore's Law seems to work specifically because it's applied to a field that presently has a lot of untapped potential. Processes can continue to be refined, the market for the devices continues to grow, and as yet the limits on either haven't quite been hit.
Re:Moore's Law (Score:5, Interesting)
The faster the disc spins, the stronger the laser has to be. The lasers in DVD burners are already powerful enough to do real damage. There's probably some reluctance on manufacturers' part to hand out class-IV lasers for $29.99 with mail-in rebate.
Re:Moore's Law (Score:5, Insightful)
people dont understand that all moore's law said is that every 18 months the number of transistors would double. It did not say anything more. It has been widely overblown into an entire economic concept of technological markets and commodities that progress in exponential/logarithmic ways.
Also, these things cannot suspend the laws of physics.
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Also, these things cannot suspend the laws of physics.
Where's Scotty when we need?
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Him. Where's Scotty when we need HIM.
*sigh*
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Hard disk space is cheaper than DVD space.
Absolutely not true.
1.5 TB hard drive [newegg.com] - $130
300x 4.7 GB DVD-Rs [newegg.com] - $54
Even allowing for an extra 100 pack of DVDs to make up the difference, DVD-Rs are still half the cost/GB of hard drives.
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Prices on 1.5TB have dropped like a rock. They are, in units/dollar, cheaper than .5TB, slightly cheaper than 1TB, and roughly equal to .75TB.
Actually, I just picked up some 1.5TB on sale for 10 bucks over the 1TB cost. Either I'm about to suffer an early warranty replacement, or the incremental cost between the .75, 1 and 1.5 is only due to testing/grading performance like the various CPU/GPU chips that can be downgraded to fit the market demand.
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You mean the 1.5TB Seagates which are now notorious for being flaky drives [slashdot.org]?
Personally, I'm using 1TB drives from diff manufs (Samsungs seem to be a bit flaky) and waiting for the 2TB drives to be available from multiple manufs.
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Even if a stack of DVDs and a hard drive were the exact same price per gigabyte you would still want to have the hard drive. The hard drive offers considerable more value than a stack of DVDs that cannot the average seek time of any random data is about a minute as you have to find the disc, load the disc, and so on.
As it stands now if you want to backup large chunks of data such as an entire HD then you should not be going with DVDs. If you want to backup DVDs or small files then DVDs are fine.
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Absolutely not true.
1.5 TB hard drive [newegg.com] - $130
300x 4.7 GB DVD-Rs [newegg.com] - $54
Even allowing for an extra 100 pack of DVDs to make up the difference, DVD-Rs are still half the cost/GB of hard drives.
If you want convenient access to your DVD-Rs, you'll want individual cases. These cost slightly more than the disks. Then you'll need a storage shelf and maybe some labels. Add these costs and DVDs and hards disks are roughly equal.
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And an automatic disc-changer. If I'm going to be swapping 300+(don't forget coasters) discs any more frequently than once a year, I want a robot to do it for me.
One of my relatives bought one, slightly used, to burn training DVDs and it is awesome(if really damn heavy).
Shameless plug for the pyros, his second DVD on how to make fire [wildernessawareness.org] covers a bunch of usually impractical ways to make fire: the fire plow(a la Castaway), various electrical, lots of chemical, and lenses(including jello & ice).
The first on
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A very fast DVD reader would be brilliant for my current way of using CD's and DVD's : copy them to drive (removing any constraints) and playing the media later on. I have a hick up free experience and I safe battery life. They could even make one that was very fast but could not do searching; just rip the whole thing to drive already, I'll use a virtual DVD or CD-ROM if required...