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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.
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.
Think of a small run CD-R house that uses CD-R towers for burning. Let's say they have two or three of these and they do CD-R burning for their customers (think small area bands who can't afford going to large CD replication houses and ordering 5000+ stamped CDs).
If they're trying to burn 1,000 CD-Rs and they can save 28,000 seconds (nearly eight hours), it translates into doing more of these 1,000 CD-R jobs (or even 500 CD-R jobs) per month, per year, etc.
Which translates into making more money.
Make sense now?
As I recall, each speed increase turns out more frisbees than the last. 10x burns less reliably than 8x, etc
If you have a first-generation crappy drive, or use media that isn't designed for that burn speed then that's true.
theoretical maximum number of CDs they can burn
Yes, and HD's have a theoretical average number of hours before failure. So? All mechanical systems fail at one point or another.
yet to see a CD-R rated for more than 24x
You haven't looked recently, have you? Try here, or here, or here.
Plextor at least (apparantly) won't let you burn at a higher speed than the CD-R(W) is rated for
That's dependant on the software, not the hardware. I know you can turn it off in Nero, and probably most other CD burning software.
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
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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