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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.
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."
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
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)
A 40X writer doesn't spin the disc any faster than a single-laser 40X reader would.
I had a kenwood "52X" drive that actually spun the disc at about 16X and had multiple beam pickup... much quieter, very fast, but didn't last very long. Now it's unusable because it gets so hot, and won't read half my CDR's.
-CausticPuppy "Of all the people I know, you're certainly one of them." -Somebody I don't know
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 ?