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Forty-Speed CD-RW Shootout
Keefe John writes: "Several months ago, 40x burning became a reality when Plextor got the jump on all of the other optical storage companies with the PX-W4012TA CD-RW. Since then, many companies have been coming out with versions of their own. As with any genre of products, a few stood out above the rest. Namely, the original tried and true Plexwriter; the wallet-friendly Lite-On, and the speed-daemon Teac. Today Techware Labs will be comparing the three drives on their relative merits. Read the full review over at Techware Labs."
Great. That means you can now burn a 74-minute long CD in 111 seconds instead of 139. Just think what you could do with those extra 28 seconds!
Or, no -- wait! Surely it couldn't be that this is just another manifestation of My CPU's Got More Megahertz Than Yours syndrome?
Could it?
--
What short sigs we have -
One hundred and twenty chars!
Too short for haiku.
I expect they'll be around quite a while -- personally I'd still rather spend $20 for 50 cd-rs, and $80 for a fast CD-Burner, than $50 for 5 dvd-rs, and $450 for a slow DVD-Burner.
Anyone know how long it takes to burn a 4.7GB DVD on one of those drives?
do these new drives spin the disc really fast or use some kind of multi-write technology? The article didn't mention it (as I can see)
I remember reading that the current drives are reaching a limit where a disc will shatter because it is spun too fast, could these drives have a problem with that?
Sometime back on /. there was article on how spinning a CD too fast would result in a shattered CD. Now I would be interested in knowing how high spin speeds, below shattering speed, would effect the life span of a CD - would we see pit damage due to heat or any other effects?
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
As I recall, each speed increase turns out more frisbees than the last. 10x burns less reliably than 8x, etc.
Not to mention that CD-RW drives DO have a theoretical maximum number of CDs they can burn before they're worn out to the point of turning out NOTHING but frisbees...
Given those 2 points in mind, then what's the point for most people? I'm sure small software or music studios might be able to make use of it (probably cheaper, or at least easier than having their CDs pressed, especially for small runs), but I can't really see it being that practical for the home user very often (yet), especially since I have yet to see a CD-R rated for more than 24x, with most being 16x and the Plextor at least (apparantly) won't let you burn at a higher speed than the CD-R(W) is rated for.
Dark Nexus
"Sanity is calming, but madness is more interesting."
but my problem is finding 40x media, I can usually only find media certified for 32x. Does anyone have any experience using 32x media at higher speeds?
No 40x LG review? (I can't get at the article, so I'm going to assume what slashdot said was true).
Cheap, and reasonably reliable. Works like a champ in linux. I'd get another LG.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
I have the 40X liteon (Cendyne OEM'd box) drive for around $70 last month. It replaced a Verbatim 32X drive I got the month before (took back to get faster drive at same price>
.. I beg to differ. I follow the alt.binaries.multimedia.anime and alt.binaries.anime groups on Usenet and 1.5 - 2 gigs per day of downloads are not uncommon. While this only works out to maybe 3 disks per day I don't religiously burn everything I have every night. Things like wanting to burn only episodes of the same show on a disk or simple lazyness do matter.
.. and at 2:30 per disk vs 3:00 - 3:30 per disk. It makes a big difference.
While there is only a comparitively small increase in speed the actual usable speed was more than a minute better. The Verbatim drive took much longer to close the session out and waited till later in the burn to switch up to it's highest speed.
As far as the argument that faster speeds are bragging rights only
I sometimes queue up 35 gig or more of stuff to burn
Someone may comment that I just need to get a DVD drive. That's the next step, for right now a 40x burner and $0.10 per CD or lower is more cost effective than $270 (with shipping and such) for a DVD burner and ~$2.00 per DVD.
I don't know what the article says, but I can tell you from firsthand experience. I have an Asus 40/12/48x drive. I've been quite please with it. I did some timing tests when I first got it, and as I recall it was on the order of 3:30 to burn a 700MB disk at 40x, but dropped only to about 4:00 at 32x and was still in the neighborhood of four and a half minutes at 24x. My memory may be off by thirty seconds in either direction, but the times for the upper speeds were very similar (due, of course to the limitation the first poster noted).
--Jim
Faster is not necessarily better.
We prevent drives writing faster than 8x because we have found the disks cause problems further down the line when sent as demos (unplayable) or to CD pressing plants where there are errors found on the disks.
---- The Open Source Record Label : : LOCARECORDS.COM
You can get the Lite-On 40x cd-rw for around $70. The cool part is on their website you can download a flash upgrade to make it a 48x burner. 48x cd-rw for $70 is a good deal
1+2+1+1 || 1+2+2+1
These new CD-RW drives are nice, but what I really want to know is can I use them to make a backup of my copy of NWN, WarCraft3, etc? Considering the damn copyrestrictions they place on them, with 90 day warranties for replacement (ha...). Especially considering if you have a "collector's edition" game with special CDs (e.g. Diablo 2, WarCraft 3, etc), if that CD gets damaged, the best you get is a replacement with a regular edition CD (hey, it's nice to have a goodlooking set!)).
A) No-CD cracks don't work because most games are beta-quality, and patches come out continually.
B) Unauthorized patches are bad if you want network play (I paid for the game, I want to play online!)
C) If my CD breaks, and I couldn't copy it, you bet I will look for a pirated copy. Sorry, but the price of today's games (add taxes and stuff, and it's over $100 Canadian!) mean I'll buy *ONE* copy. If it breaks, you're going to get roasted the next time one of your games comes out (I paid $100 for this shiny disc I can't use anymore?).
D) A disposable CD-R backup is excellent when you go to LAN parties as well as to friend's houses. Never worry about losing a game somewhere.
(And it isn't a piracy issue. If I pirated the games, all I'd do is burn the damn ISOs onto CDs, copy them to my hard disk, and use a CD emulator like Daemon Tools (great for mounting Linux ISOs on Windows). I'd just need any damn CD-RW drive that can write a ISO9660 filesystem!)
Ah, furgitaboutit. I'll just use CloneCD to dump the CDs to ISOs.
This Page [google cache] tested CD Roms to destruction and concluded the fastest a CD rom could spin at without self-destructing was 64x to quote
"A 64x drive using CLV would have to rotate the disc with 33,920 rpm when reading an inner track, exposing the hub of the disk to a tangential force of some 45 N/mm2. A point on the periphery of the disc will be moving with 213 metres per second, slightly more than half the speed of sound. Can the disc take that?
The answer is no. A powerful no.
At about 52x, i.e. 27,500 rpm, most manufacturer's CDs blew up in a rain of plastic particles, leaving their marks on the premises. The result was a pile of shimmering plastic chips."
seems a bit silly/iresponsible to even get close to those speeds if storing data reliably is an issue (especially using 20c media), sure the drive might reach those speeds but will the media ?, has this drive got something special to prevent destruction (multiple heads etc) or is it just using brute force ?