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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."
I got this plextor drive shortly after it came out and amazingly, it is QUIETER than the 24x10x40! If you are looking for pretty quiet CD-Rw, I say you should check the plextor 40x12x40 out. Furthermore, the slower one has a fan on the back and mine does not! (Try to get the European version, btw, because it comes with Nero as opposed to Roxio EasyCD.0
If you submit a /. story to a site that you run, please check your bandwidth first to see if it can survive the Slashdot effect, or at least put up a less-graphic version of the page.
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?
--
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One hundred and twenty chars!
Too short for haiku.
To be technically correct, they have a MAX speed of 40X. They don't burn at that speed throughout the entire burn, they may reach that speed at some point though. That's why the actual burn time of a CD has pretty much reached it's limit. Going from 8x to 16x is not the same as going from 16x to 32x.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
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."
As others have mentioned, Plextor does. I believe there are some Toshiba models still available too. Just do a search on Pricewatch and you'll see who has what. I know that Newegg carries the Plextor.
Of course, you'll pay a hefty premium ($50 more for the Plextor SCSI, or 300% compared to Lite-On, Cyberdrive, or other inexpensive CD-RWs) and get a much slower drive (12/10/32 vs 40/12/40 or 40/12/52).
Unfortunately you don't have any choice in the matter for your instance. But people building workstation PCs with all SCSI are (by and large) just screwing themselves now.
TCP connection to 'ssadler.phy.bnl.gov' failed: Connection refused.
I guess I'll never know.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
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 ?
- Although the maximum reading speed of the drive is 48x, it will be factory set at 40x and includes a SpeedRead function that enables users to select the higher speed.
Oh, the burnmanity!Patrick Peeters explains: "The reason we use this unique approach is to provide flexibility to customers: for the vast majority 40x is the ideal mix of speed/quality, but there are a small number that will require 48x. However, the increase in speed from 40x to 48x can increase the noise for any drive in the market. In extreme circumstances using high-speed reading, where the CD is severely scratched, it can explode in any drive and even cause injuries to the user. We have redesigned the PlexWriter 48/24/48A drive to strengthen the front bezel to prevent any injuries. To our knowledge, we are the only manufacturer in the market to have implemented this safety feature."
Money for nothing, pix for free
Someone, somewhere, is thinking very hard about how to turn his knowledge into a dangerous anti-piracy measure.
"Damn man, what happened to your arm?"
"Was trying to cd-to-cd copy some juarez and the damn CD exploded. My cat wasn't as lucky."
Finally, math books without any of that base 6 crap in them.
Whatever about saving that precious extra 30 seconds or so during burning, I prefer to know that my burner can handle some of the more neferious copy protection schemes now coming to market.
Many of these are based on sending abnormally regular EFM subchannel data to the CDRW and relying on it to crap out. You can get details about the capabilities of current burners here, but this CloneCD list describes exactly which burners have the firmware "Correct EFM-Encoding" cojones to defeat the latest copy protection.
I'm glad to see that the "wallet-friendly Lite-On" drives seem to feature some of the the most consistent support for defeating EFM trickery.
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