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CDRW Drives Hit 52X Speeds
Sr.Mixalot writes "Just when you think you couldn't burn those shared MP3s any faster, Asus comes out with a 52X Burner. This review at Hot Hardware shows just how fast this drive is versus a Plextor 48X unit. Amazingly, this new breed of CDRW Drives can burn a complete 700MB CD in about 2.5 minutes!"
12x ought to be enough for everyone ;)
'They glow green during read operations and yellow/amber during writes.'
When is someone gonna post how to exchange the green LED for super duper bright blue?
pm
** "It's not my job to stand between the people talking to me, and the ones listening to me." -- Pego the Jerk
Are these just tricked up 48x drives like the 52x CD-ROM drives of a few years ago?
Stop corporate
Now we just need for CD-R/W media that can write *reliably* at 52x !
I can see these drives being woefully under-utilised till middle of next year...
-MT.
is it really worth paying some ghastly price per blank CD just do have it done it a minute instead of 10? It's not like many people spend all day burning discs ala factory-worker style.
That these cd-r speeds are ramping up so quickly.
After all, they are using CAV not CLV to determine it's maximum speed.
2.5 minutes is impressive until you realize that yesterdays cd-r burned in 2.51 minutes.
Besides, it's no good for me.. Playstation and Xbox games don't come out reliably if burned any higher than 4x.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Just when you think you couldn't burn those shared MP3s any faster...
;) when people just assume that all burners of CDs are thieves. Because I'm not, and I don't want my kids to think so. I love them.
I try to do everything ethically-sound. I'm not religious, and I've found that I'm generally a "better" person than most religious folks anyway.
But that being said, I run a Free operating system. All of the software I use is Free as well. I don't need Microsoft Office; my kids write their papers in plain text and I convert it into HTML and print those out.
My point is that not all of us burn "shared" (translation: stolen). The only CDs I'll ever burn are full of photos of family/friends, or backup copies of software/files, or audio CD mixes from CDs that I already own.
I'm sorry, I just take offense (and it's early and I haven't had coffee
I had a 2X burner since 1997.. got it for $250.. around then.. poor thing just recently died (R.I.P), but I feel that rather than buying a new CD-RW.. i think the best bet is to purchase a DVD-RW..
;-))
After researching a bunch of CD-RW's and reviews, etc.. I went ahead and purchased a Sony DRU-500A for $310.. pricey of course, but eh..
Just got it a week ago, and I'm impressed.. the CD-RW speed is only 24x, but the main thing is I can burn DVDs as well (which have been flawless, so far
So I guess pricewise and maybe because it's still a new technology, a CD-RW might still be the best for some, but if you know DVD-RW's are round the corner and expect to get one very soon, might as well take that approach..
"The ones who dont do anything are always the ones who try to pull you down" -- Henry Rollins
the media falls apart and send shards of plastic into your jugular and eye socket?
This sounds a like a perfect recipe for Senseless Explosion
Does it have a metal front to prevent fragments from a exploding CD-ROM to shoot out from it?
At speeds like that, anything can happen.
... I just want solid, reliable recording first. Sounds like the cart is being put before the horse first. I want a CD-R that's gonna burn perfectly every time. I don't care how fast it is. Burning something at 52x 4 times to get it to work (and making 3 coasters in the process) is slower than burning it at 12x. Besides, CD-R isn't generally a process that is needed to be done fast. It's for dupes or backups. Right now, I burn at 4x and it works every time. I won't go every faster until the drives/software are better.
I recall there was some experimentation to determine the maximum possible speed for existing cd drivers. What was found was that as one approached 100x, the physical media commonly used today would shatter. Sorry captain, she just wont take it! So, unless materials used for cd's change, there is an upper limit to this cd x speed madness...
52x burners have been out for a while. I ordered a 52x Lite-On from newegg a week ago (and recieved it a few days ago - it's fast). There are a few others burners out there too. I don't see how they can call it "fastest burner ever" without even testing the various other 52x burners.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
I wonder how this compares to other 52x drives out there like the LiteOn 52x24x52?
I find that the faster you burn CD's at, the more regular CDROM drives have issues reading them. And this isnt with cheap media either - I always use Sony or TDK or similar.
We have a nice 30 something speed plextor CDRW at work, but whenever I burn something there, I set it down to about 12 or 16 speed to make sure its going to work ok on my Pioneer DVD drive at home.
"Hey! Unless this is a nude love-in, get the hell off my property!!"
First, Lite-on had a 52x drive for a while now. Secondly, even 24x drives burn a cd in 2.5 minutes. Thirdly, this is just a blatant plug for a shitty hardware review site.
http://wuarchive.wustl.edu/users/tom/mirrors/cdexp lode/
notable excerpt:
"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."
I guess that the higher numbers sound kind of cool, but when the thing has a glitch that flings the CD-R media out of the drive at 5000mph, nearly severing your head and wedging itself in your stereo, you've just gotta ask yourself "Is burning a CD 2 minutes faster worth the risk?"
But is it worth it to save 5 or 10 minutes? 52x media must be a hell of a lot more expensive than normal 12x CDr's.
CD-R drives burn YOU at 52x!
I mean, are we so pressed for time that we have to speed up everything ? What happened to patience ? Are Americans so obsessed with saving time that they will do absolutely anything to shave a few seconds off burning an MP3 ?
No wonder American men have a worldwide reputation for premature ejaculation! They are just trying to save themselves valuable time.
My CD burner supposedly does 16x. Bullshit. The highest speed at which I can burn without getting errors every one out of three times is 4x. You'll need some good luck to actually get 52x out of that one.
That's still a lot slower than the matter generator on Star Trek. When the hell are we going to get those? :-D
I've had my Lite-On 52x-24x for well over a month. It burns at about the same speed as that ASUS. Bought it from here.
Realy nice to see a drive that can handel
various quality cds, as it appears this one can..
though, maybe it jsut forced writign at 52X rathe then the cds actual rating..
You have 5 Moderator Points!
Which Helpless Linux zealot/MS basher do you want to mod down today?
it has been perfected.
DVD burners are really looking good these days. At 4x DVD you can burn the equivalent of 8 CD's on 1 DVD in 15 minutes.
Faster, more convenient and occupies less space on that already crowded CD rack.
The only advantage I can see to this, is that anything significantly - 50%? - slower is going to be that much cheaper now. .
Life way behind the bleeding edge . .
Processor at 866, 256MB Memory, 5400 IDE Discs. That is fast enough for anything I do.
I could use the speed. Where I work we sometimes need to create presentations for clients in Director/Flash etc and these will need to be replicated onto multiple CDs - upto around 100 or so.. We use a standard CD RW for doing this.. if I am able to save 30 seconds on writing any CD, and I am doing 100 CDs.. I save a cool 50 minutes, which is not bad considering how boring the activity really is.
Also, we could use the speed when we need to backup the servers onto CD ROMs..
Amazingly, this new breed of CDRW Drives can burn a complete 700MB CD in about 2.5 minutes!"
My trusty 16x CDRW can burn a 700 MB CDR in about 5 minutes, and faster burners give slightly better performance. (For the uninitiated, faster burners (24x and higher) write most of the CDR slower than their "maximum" speed.) This CDRW is probably only running at 52x for a minor portion of the burn.
OTOH, the CDRW speeds are starting to ramp up nicely. I like using CDRWs to back up files, but even at 10x it can take a while to burn a full disk. For many CDRW enthusiasts, the big story isn't the "quantum leap" from 48x to 52x, its the CDRW speeds.
An increase from 48X to 52X only represents an 8.33 percent increase in speed. Am I the only one not impressed by this?
-- jetlag --
That would be sooo nice... maybe our grandchildren will see it
Three or four drives of those drives + 100 cds in a spindle = very fast.
The extra write-speed is not really needed. I like the 24x rewrite tough. It would make working with my udf-bootcd a lot nicer. At my current 8x it is not much fun... (but at least workable)
I am in the market for a new cdrw since my Sony CDE-100 or something just bit the dust after almost 4 years. I think it recorded at -2x or something because I could play a cd at real speed faster than it could record one. Also, it began to create CDs that were no longer playable in my car (or anywhere?). So I am in the market for a new cdrw, and I need to balance price and reliability, and then speed. I have a 450mhz running Win2k primarily. Any suggestions or success stories, so that I can buy myself a late Hanukkah present?
The only cds i see around can only support 40x, its not really worth it to upgrade to that, if i were going to buy another burner it would have to be a dvd burner, im not goping to waste my money
CD BURNS YOU! OUCH!
you must of mistaken me for someone who actually gives a shit
why would i want to burn a cd in 2.5min ?
is my life so busy that a 24x isnt good enough ?
i think this is just a pathetic attempt to make
must be another slow news day or another tacky slashvertisment
Buy another CD-RW instead... That's 100% speed increase.
Donate free food to the hungry at The Hunger site.
It is for this reason that the RIAA *wants* you to burn as many CDs as possible. The more media you use, the more money they make. The 'coasters' you produce at these very higher speeds only puts more money in their pockets, since you will need to replace that coaster with another RIAA-supported CD-R.
This plan is insidious, and affects all those who burn CDs.
You can help by burning less CDs, by burning them only at 1x or 2x, taking care not to scratch them, using jewel cases, and only burning a CD when you have enough to fill one.
Together, we can stop supporting the terrorism of the RIAA!
Good Luck!
Going OT here, but what deck is it you have? Wouldn't be a Pioneer unit by chance? :)
"Hey! Unless this is a nude love-in, get the hell off my property!!"
They have to be as fast as possible. At the rate things are going, I wouldn't find it at all surprising to see CD-RWs become the next floppy disks. Portable media needs to be able to write the uber-files of the future that we will need to be moving around for whatever reason (assuming you're not networked).
Right now you're doing "Do unto others as they've done unto you" kind of thing. Why do you think that all those 'shared MP3s' are stollen? There're many free MP3s floating around. And yes *I KNOW* that most of MP3s are stolen but don't forget that hasty generalization is allways dangerous thing!
You say you're better person than the 'most religious folks'. How the fuck you know? Is it because you love your children? Or because you don't burn stolen MP3s? What a narowminded view. Maybe you're really good person according to your ethos, but to me you're not. (Call it flamebait but I couldn't resist).
-- AlCoHoLiC (posting anonymnously because I'm using friend's computer)
"12x ought to be enough for everyone
What? A number 2 pencil and several boxes of paper ought to be fast enough for everyone.
No, forget the paper. Just memorizing everything should be fast enough.
w00t.
No, it's a Panasonic CQ-DFX572N. Pioneers were (maybe they still are) far too expensive at the time I bought it.
Donate free food to the hungry at The Hunger site.
That comment must have been really bad.
Lite-On has had a 52x/24x/52x model out for a long time now. It started selling at Newegg.com in the beginning of november for about $79
Repeal the DMCA!
Ah right..
;)
:)
I got the Pioneer DEH-P7400MP with the Organic EL display on it.. it cost me around £250 ($400'ish) roughly when I bought it in the summer, but the prices have fallen heavily and I suspect you could pick em up for under $300 easily now in the USA. Assuming you are in the USA
What a great technology - totally negated the need for a 10x CD changer in the boot at least!
"Hey! Unless this is a nude love-in, get the hell off my property!!"
CowboyNeal: It can burn a cd in 2.5 minutes.
Homer: Aww 2.5 minutes. I want it now!
std::disclaimer<std::legalese> sig=new std::disclaimer; sig->dump(); delete sig;
Now It's down to $70, and the equivalent Asus model is $79
Repeal the DMCA!
Looks like we're getting within an order of magnitude of the theoretical limits of CD-burning! PIO mode 4 caps at 16.7M/sec, which is about 111x, less than double! I bet soon we'll be seeing UDMA or even ATA/66/100/133 CD-R/DVD-R drives... I imagine there's a need for some extra headroom as far as IDE bus bandwidth is concerned...
This actually raises an interesting thought...supposing your drive is 52x at PIO4, would you get a buffer underrun if both the source and destination drive in a burn operation are on the same IDE channel? It would seem, then, that you'd want, at a minimum, slightly more than double the bandwidth of the writer in the IDE bus that it sits on...
Hmmm...
"If at first you don't succeed, lower your standards."
Come on people this is really amazing! a 9% increase! This is as great as when we went from 2x to 2.18x.
As the previous poster pointed out, this applies only to Music CDs. Sterero-component style audio CD recorders look for encoding present on the Music CDs, and they will not record to "Standard" CD-R discs. Computer CD-RW drives do not require special media. There is no RIAA "Tax" on media not specifically marked "Music".
There is a home market for these. So often at shows i go to, the opening bands will toss out free cds that they recorded, mixed, and then burned, probably on their own equiptment in their basement. The quality isn't studio, but a couple of 17 year olds opening for lesser known bands in small bars cant really afford studio time and cd stamping. BTW, stamping only becomes economical if you do A LOT, some friends of mine were forced to make their fans pre-order their CDs because there was no way in hell they could afford to have them stamped themselves. But since then they've gotten signed to Drive-Thru.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
I bought mine at about 250 USD in Europe (USA radio frequencies are incompatible here as you should know) in the summer. Only drawback is that you can't play VBR encoded MP3s (actually you can, but they pop and crack), but still great to have in the car.
Donate free food to the hungry at The Hunger site.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
mod parent up!!
I recently got a 24x CDRW thinking that NOW would be the time to get organized and burn all that data (wink wink) on my HD that I would have had to wait for days getting burned on my old 2x CDRW.
But guess what? laziness took over in less than 2 days and no burning happened. All i want for these CDRW is not a 100x or 1000x speed but a nice feeder tray - I drop in all my brand new CDs at the top, it gets burned, opens and drops it down to another hopper that holds my burned CD.
Nothing less than that is going to quench my need for Greed without having to move my butt.
Siggy Say, Siggy Do
Also, if I burn a CDR on my lowly 8X drive, the lead in and lead out tracks often take longer to write than the data, if the disc isn't full. Is this part of the process speeded up as well?
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
my band does this :p
It depends upon what you currently have.
As I see it, it's not really an issue for those of us running 44x burners, the time saved isn't worth it (to me).
Having said that, my previous cdrw was a 12x, which in turned supplanted a 2x. I still use the older ones as I buy the new ones to go in new PCs I build.
Leaving aside the people who feel the need to have the latest and fastest It's just incremental improvements, when you have a 2x burner and the new ones are 4x, who cares? But when it's a 24x that's significant.
When you want a new CDR you make a decision - for me I buy the fastest (burnproof) in my Budget that I consider 'reliable'. I just bought a Yamaha F1, to me the neat feature is the audio mastering, or somesuch - it sacrifices a few minutes per CD to make the lamds and bits slightly larger which improves playability on audio cd players. Oh and it has, IIRC, an 8mb buffer.
I hereby inform you that I have NOT been required to provide any decryption keys.
Thus the headline should read 28.32x burner released, compared with 28x, saves you 15 seconds!!
Yawn.
Which was a bigger deal, the jump from 2X to 4X or 48X to 52X? Even ignoring the fact that the faster drives use a form of CAV and not CLV, a jump from 48 to 52 is...
And I don't want to hear from those people who say "well i've burned 100's of cd's at 48X and they all work fine for me." Yeah, in that one cdrom you use them in. Have you ever used the nero testing utility to check the number of C1 errors on those "perfect" disks of yours? Yeah they may work on your drive, but how about someome elses? And how about a year from now when they have a few scratches in them? I for one would hate to maintain multiple versions of disks, one for me, and one for everyone else.
In the end it all comes down to this. How much time does 52X save if you just have to burn it again anyway?
My advice is this....if you're getting a new burner, by all means get a fast one. When you start using new media, run some tests to find a safe speed, and then stick with that. But to those of you who ditch your perfectly fine 32X+ writer to buy a new 52X one...I think you're fools.
-Chris
--an unbreakable toy is useful for breaking other toys--
oh man! the new burning rate's even faster than my porn downloading rate... and i thought engines of my wrist were fast enough to cause *burns*...
my blog
Why, oh why are you repeating a previous post after having acknowledged said post? Looks like another Slashbot can't wait to hear himself talk.
You could consider a robot. I know someone who used one of these, one standard cdrom, one standard cdrw in a box with a robot arm and a stack of blank cdrs on a spindle.
They even had a CD printer so the arm picks up a blank, drops it in the burner, and then takes it out of the burner and drops it in the printer, takes out of printer and stacks on output spindle - repeat until input stack empty. No manual intervention required. How much is your time worth to your company.?
I hereby inform you that I have NOT been required to provide any decryption keys.
Why not have the head spin around the CD in the opposite direction that the CD is spinning? cd spins at 52x, head spins in opposite direction at 52x (and is not subject to shattering at too high a speed if made of the right materials so it could spin faster), and you get yourself a 104x CD-ROM. The downfall is that this would be an external drive as it would be too big to fit in a regular CD-ROM slot.
All misspellings and grammatical errors in the above post are intentional and part of my artistic expression.
Am I the only person who would like to see Minidisks being used instead of floppy disks? - Does anyone know if this is possible?
Imagine...
AC/DC
Anonymous Coward/Don't Care
Don't click that link, it redirects to goatse.cx god damnit. Fucking trolls.
Its Matter-Antimatter Generator. Get it right next time!
Look! A trail of bread crumbs.
52x have been out for a while now. About a month ago I was going to purchase a 52x TDK Velo CD burner from their website at only $129.00, instead I returned my 40x back to walmart telling them it was broken and exchanged it for the new 48x. To top it all off I got a $10 refund and 10 free Cd-R discs. BTW, TDK Velo burners are the best I have ever used, and I have owned a bumch of different ones. Over 200 cds burned and not one coster!!!
Lite On drives at this speed have been out on the market, and even on the counter of stores like Best Buy for about a month now. Why is this so amazing all of a sudden?
People, why do you make negative comment about faster/bigger things coming out. If five years from, you'd still be happy with your 8X CD burning, then that would be fine. But you won't be so STFU about not wanting anything more than 8X. I burn at 40X and I love it. And some day, when the price is right and things work well, I'll burn at 52X.
I had the same thing: Yamaha 4x SCSI burner that ran like a champ and never coastered unless I did something stupid during the burn. Granted, on the Mac at least, Toast pre-buffers the data into RAM before burning.
Sadly, I left it on overnight in a crappy external case and it overheated somehow. The HP I got to replace it couldn't do the Verify faster than 8x which made for some slow-ass burns. Grr. Then I just got an LG DVD/CDR/W combo drive for the internal bay. Works like a champ.
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
Shut up.
The subsidies are for audio CD-Rs only.
Only in the United States of America. In Canada, the CPCC collects a levy for all digital storage devices and media. Some European countries have much the same arrangement.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Not only have Lite-On had a 52X drive out for a while, you can also flash the firmware from an "old" 48X drive up to 52X speed. An "overclocked" Lite-On drive is no different, hardware-wise, than the real thing.
That said, my 48X Lite-On is fast enough for me - and no, I've not burned any coasters writing at that speed. Those of you who believe it's impossible are living in the stone age - high speed writing is here and it works great. And it's cheap! Paid $53 for my drive, and 48X media is no more expensive than slower media - just as with the hardware, as the media improves it replaces the older, slower media at the same price.
There are physical characteristics of CD's that worry me about 52X writing (or reading), however, and that's why I won't go that high - it's not a question of getting a bad write, but a serious issue of exploding discs at such a high rotational speed.
2x = CD-R in 40 minutes; 4x = CD-R in 20 minutes. I'd say that is a significant improvement.
I went from 4x to 24x to 48x. 4x to 24x was a significant improvement. 24x to 48x was more minor.
...we're probabilly supposed to have a special license to have some of these babies (such as RImage). Otherwise, police will figure we're software pirates and we might be jailed for this. (which is'nt nice). But hey, I need to have much data or be a softtware house to need one of these, anyways...
I still burn at 1x
damn trolls
Modern Copyright is a draconian misinterpretation of the ethical copyright, originating in the American constitution. The modern copyright legislation is all based on laws passed as a result of high pressure from organization such as MPAA and RIAA. Thus, it is not unethical to not abide by these copyright laws.
Also, copyright infringement is by no means identical, similar or matching to the definition of "stolen" in the dictionary. Note that almost all definitions of theft insist that the stolen item must be removed completely, at least temporarily, from its rightful owner. Thus, as you see, copyright infringement cannot be classified as theft -- at least not in English.
The MPAA and RIAA have even managed to brainwash people like you into associating MP3's with copyright infringement, where in fact they are simply an audio compression format.
First off, there isnt even media out there that burns well at that speed. Even the highest quality CD-R's have high failure rates at this speed. Also Asus cannot even begin to compete with Plextor in this market simply because of the quality of Plextor burners. Plextor is the gold standard for burners and this shouldnt be denied. When I see a burner with this quality ill think about it.
One of the cheaper brands (Cendyne?) has had a 52X CD-RW (It's 52X read/write, 48X rewrite) at my local OfficeMax for a few months now.
:)
Doesn't matter, though. I still use my trusty Memorex CRW-1622 that I bought 5 years or more ago. 37 minutes to burn a CD, but I have *never* gotten a coaster.
Of course, the reason I knew about the other brand of 52X burner mentioned above is because I've been eyeing a new burner for a few months now!
"Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives" should be a convenience store, not a government agency.
You could also have multiple write heads.
Heck, I didn't even know this was news. I picked up a 52x Memorex CDRW drive at Sam's club a week ago for a system I'm building. I had no idea I was on the cutting edge.
This space for rent.
Are you having similar issues? Any tips?
My Sony/Lite-on came bundled with my PC, and is 48x as standard... but with a little bit of firmware trickery can become a 52x. Didn't think it was anything special.
Shame that my bundled copy of Nero only supports 40x really.
1X == 150KB/s.
This means '52X' is 7800KB/s or 7.61MB/s. A 700MB disc / 7.6MB/s == 92 seconds.
Guess what...150 seconds (2.5minutes) is 63% MORE time, that this '52X' drive actually takes to make a 700MB disc.
If this thing CAN ever hit a 52X speed, it would be only on the outer most edge of the disc, where throughput is fastest. Otherwise it's average nominal speed is 32X, or LESS for images smaller than a full 700MB. On my brandy new '48X' drive, I've yet to see it break 35X at it's peak speed.
Fixating time aside, these drives consistantly under perform their ratings. Smudging the number is one thing, but a 30%+ differences are ridiculous.
I thought these suckers would blow up when spun at more than 50x for any length of time. I don't see a test for this on the Orange Book high-speed page.
I have one of these babies...they are awesome...beware of dodgy media though...one of them shattered in my drive...and it was an original...I had seen a very slight crack on the inside but never thought much of it but these drives spin so bloody fast so beware click link below to see the handywork...anyone else had any similar experience with these superfast drives?...Oh yeah, the drive was replaced so that was great.... http://www.geocities.com/athlonxpnz/jedi-outcast-s hattered-cd.jpg
An interesting note...
My LG 24x10x40x will burn a full audio CD in 2.5 - 3 minutes. This drive also will not underrun - ever. I have yet to produce a single coaster (and I've gone through about 150 blank CD-Rs since I've bought it). It might have something to do with the fact that it has an 8 MB buffer, which is something you don't see on most CD-RW drives.
The beauty part? I got it at Future Shop for $79 (Canadian) after rebate about 6 months ago.
LG has really gotten their act together apparently.
My only gripe? Digital Audio Extraction peaks at about 8x. My friend's El Cheapo 48x10x48x CD-RW drive sucks, but it does DAE at about 24x.
I think, therefore I am an Atheist.
I find that when I burn faster than 8x on my 40x burner (TEAC CD-W540E) that I have trouble with about 10-20% of the burned CDs in my DVD-ROM. With 8x I still have to find a bad burn (media are Imation 32x compatibles). Don't get me wrong, the burner does read the media correctly most of the time, even when using 32x, but the read-tests with the DVD-ROM clearly show that writing quality is far lower when burning fast.
I personally find 10 minutes per CD-R quite acceptable. Before, I used a 2x burner, that _was_ somewhat slow....
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted and ignored otherwise.
I have an LG 8160 CD-R/W, not the fastest by any means (16x10x40), but can burn a 700 MB CD-R in just about 4.5 minutes. It's also been a rock solid performer, with only 2-3 coasters due to media defects or user error, out of, oh, something like 600 CDs in one year of ownership.
First off, one major bugaboo of faster burners is error rates. The faster you burn, the more likely a write error will occur, compounded by media quality and capabilities. Most inexpensive stock is in the 24-32x ranger, and their error rates inevitably climb with the higher speeds. You could get 100% perfect burns, but would have to spend a little extra.
Secondly, in a world where people are racking up 200Gb or more in storage space, for one to make complete backups, they would be required to burn approximately 350 700MB CD-R (or R/W) discs. If one sat down for an all day backup spree, then you're talking over 14 hours of burning, not including time spent labeling each disc, lugging home 100 disc spools of media, and buying new cases to store all of said CDs (another $60 or so in cases). Economically ridiculous, and kind of silly when you think about it.
I believe, in my opinion, that we're reaching the limits of practicality. Take into account that DVD-R/W drives are approaching affordability (eg; under $200), and that one could store approximately 7 times the data on one disc (also reaching affordable levels, a 100 DVD-R spindle running around $60 nowadays on Price Watch). I think that the limit is about reached.
While I love my LG drive, my next drive when this one finally reaches coaster city will be a DVD-R/W.
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
burning, are either A.) Extremely unlucky B.) Technologically challenged or C.) Cheap _insert bad word here_
;)
I have a 48x burner and while I only have 40x certified media, it burns at full tilt without errors. When I bought the drive a few months ago, I bought a stack of 100 CD's, since then I've burnt all but three and had ONE coaster, which was actually because I tried to make a "backup" copy of a game and it just couldn't rip the data right (unbeknownst to me until after I burnt the disc). And, if yer the cheap guy still running the old 2x or 4x burners... I feel sorry for you, I'd be nice and donate my 16x burner, but it's kinda dead
As per the whole DVD-RW drives..... Are you dumb or something? DVD-R/RW media is what, around a dollar a disc.... whereas I can get a cd for 20 cents? Add to that... since Cd's are cheaper.... how many people honestly use more than 700 megs of space for burning on a regular basis, making the drive worth the money? I don't personally know anyone, and virtually all of my friends are nerds/software pirates. So the money is better spent elsewhere.... buy some RAM or a decent CPU/Mobo combo. And for you freaks out there who say you can't burn past around 16x without a ghz proc.... *points at the C.) option of his post*
My burner machine is an old p2 400, it burns just fine with my 48x Burner.
Basically, if your burner isn't burning, it is either operator error, crappy burning software, cheap media, or a craptastic burner.
Let's say you're burning an 80 minute CD. At the theoretical max speed of the burner, here's how it breaks down:
speed time improvement
1 80.00 --
2 40.00 50%
4 20.00 50%
8 10.00 50%
12 6.67 33%
16 5.00 25%
24 3.33 33%
32 2.50 25%
40 2.00 20%
48 1.67 17%
52 1.54 8%
Notice that you get a 33% increase going from 8x to 12x, but only 8% going from 48x to 52x. Because speed and time are inversely related, you get a hyperbolic function that gives you diminishing returns on your time savings with each speed increment. You save 40 minutes going from 1x to 2x, but 1:40 going from 24x to 48x. Drives are marketed by speed, but the real benefit to the user is time.
I suppose that you could plot burn time on an assymptotic curve and pick your own comfort value for the angle of the slope (or the burn time).
I'm not much bothered about having a burn time less than about 4-5 mins - my 'go and fetch a drink' time. Anything faster than this is icing on the cake (frosting for most dotters I guess), and you can go for features. I wouldn't turn down a 60x cdrw but I wouldn't buy it over a 40x with better features.
I hereby inform you that I have NOT been required to provide any decryption keys.
Recent Plextor drives plus older ones through firmware updates have had their ability to backup protected audio and data discs crippled.
How the mighty fall...
CompUSA had these on Sale already for Thanksgiving and a buddy has had one since October. Problem is that they usually creep up in speed, so it will drop to 10-20 to start and when it is done it will be 45-50. Then again this depends on having media certified for 52x. The 32s I tried did about 34, but the 48s only got to 46. Of course it will be news when they have 1 100x burner. It just formats the image and presses the whole drive like and old LP!
My 24x drive can burn a 700 meg disc in 4 minutes. Why would I spend all that money to shave off 1.5 minutes? When this drive dies, I may buy a 32x if I can find one really, really cheap but I imagine I'll just get a leftover 24x for even less money.
Furthermore, it's a levy on items imported for resale, or manufactured. It's NOT import duty; you can still import CDR from Korea or wherever you want without paying the tax, as long as it's not for resale.
Which sort of puts Canadian CD-R manufacturers at a serious disadvantage to the Korean competition, no? By levying only domestic production, look what Canada is doing to its balance of trade.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Big deal. From 48X to 52X. So we have a 4% speed increase in burning. With the initialization and finalization times staying more or less stable this amounts to...no good reason for me to get all excited. Now if you told me the makers of DVD burners had finally realized they were being childish and made a good resolution to introduce a one standard for DVD burning at the beginning of next year...
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
is what happens if you burn say 5 cds one right after the other. If you look at the actual unit it has no exhaust fan on the back, I wouldn't be surprised if after the second or third that you start getting burn errors from overheating.
If I remember correctly, 52x drives have been on the shelves for close to a month now, and I don't consider Best Buy to be early adopters.
I keep seeing the same few points over and over again here, so here are a few statements:
- 48X media is now the standard. It is not expensive. I paid $2.99 after rebate for my last spindle of 50 48x certified Fuji media. All the media on my shelf right now is 48x certified and I haven't paid more than $8 per 100 for any of them.
- The "studies" that show CDs exploding at high speed are not relevant here. The exploding at 100x is 100x actual spin rate, not 100x data rate. The 52x referred to in this article is absolute max data rate at the outer edge of the platter. At the inner edge, the tracks are 1.75" diameter or 5.5" circumference. At the outer edge 4.75" dia or 14.9" circ. In order to have a 52X IPS rate at the outside, the drive only has to spin at an actual 52*5.5/14.9 = 19X spin rate. The discs are not going to explode. Besides, if they were going to explode in the writer, they'd explode in the 52X readers that have been common for a long time, too.
- Burning at high speeds doesn't make coasters unless there's something wrong with your equipment. I have a combination of 24X and 32X burners, and I burn hundreds of discs a month, and only produce a coaster when I screw something up, typically going hundreds of discs between coasters.
Hm... I found that if you really fill the disc with a lot of tunes it does take a while to find its feet before it starts playing. But after that its the usual 3 or 4 second gap between tunes.
I have occasionally had the drive panic and not read a CD that I know works great and is spotless.. just remove it and put it back in again and it seems to work.
I also get occasional audio glitches in the music.. this is really ear splitting if you have the music cranked right up and you get a loud glitch.
I burned all my music so far onto Verbatim CDRW's so they are all done at low (4x) speed - they seem to behave pretty well to be honest. Might be worth cutting em at low speed and see how you get on?
"Hey! Unless this is a nude love-in, get the hell off my property!!"
these have been out for at least 3 weeks, cause im lookig at a circular from the day after thanksgiving. i could swear i saw them advertised 2-3 weeks before that. /. news? news post like this seriously tarnish /.'s image.
how does some thing like this make
whats next...'486 DX\66 out now...should i upgrade?' lol
is a dangerous speed to record cds, if they are cheap that can blow up and wreck your device .. ... One interesting idee to avoid those speeds would be multi thread recording with several laser heads ... i think that there was a cd-reader with this capability ..
I fuse with Mercer every single day...
I can format my 50KB drum in 23 minutes!
Machines take me by surprise with great frequency. -A. Turing
Of course, my upgrade was pretty severe...
...To an internal that does 48x16x48. Not quite the 52x as the one in the article, but the difference for me is severe. Burning CD's was more of a chore on the old one, now I don't even think twice about it. Get it done in 3-4 minutes regardless of media type.
From an External CD/RW that was 4x4x2
I can see how it would be worth it for people who are making severe upgrades like mine. After rebates (assuming they actually mail checks) I will have paid $33.12 for mine. Yeah, it sounds like an airplane taking off as it spins up to speed. I can live with that.
Freedom is merely privilege extended unless enjoyed by one and all.
...is that they are done by people who really don't understand what they're talking about. They measure the SPEED of a burn as if its the most important thing.
...but the vast majority of reviewers just measure "how fast" the burn goes. Great -- you burned a disc in 2 1/2 minutes. Now lets see how long that disc lasts?
The fact of the matter though is that speed is largely arbitrary -- the issue is how many errors you are burning onto your disc at that speed. *EVERY* disc has errors, and the best burners are those that can create the fewest -- extra points for doing it quickly on crappy media. The problem is that there are very few tools to test BLER/C1 errors -- the "invisible" errors that are automatically corrected by your drive but increase into hard C2 errors and then uncorrectable ISO9660 errors with time and decay. You need a drive capable of doing it and software which can understand the data.
Some people, lacking the tools, have even hacked portable CD players into BLER-measurement devices.....
The point of the article was not a conceptual discussion of 52x CD burning but a head to head comparision of two individual drives the Asus CRW5224A versus a Plextor 48x24x48. The conclusion was:-
/. story is another matter.
The CRW5224A CDRW drive from Asus is currently listed on various price search engines, for around $75 - $80. For the kind of performance we've seen with this drive, it's hard to beat. Plextor's 48X drive is still close to $100 with various on line merchants, considerably more for the just the Plextor name. The Asus drive consistently out performed the Plextor 48X unit we tested along side it, whether it was reading or writing discs. Furthermore, with its most recent firmware release, the Asus CRW5224A is significantly less finicky with respect to media types, versus the Plextor unit.
It took the Asus 3.15 m:sec to rip an 18 track audio CD versus 4.37 min:sec for the Plexor. 2:45 versus 4:56. The Asus speed adjustment sensing for different media type was also superior to Plextor writing a stock Verbatim CDR at 2:45 versus 4:56 for the Plextor 48x24x48.
There are significant results for person considering buying a CDRW drive. Why a buying guide should merit a
Just when you think you couldn't burn those shared MP3s any faster, Asus comes out with a 52X Burner.
.au for about $150.
Lite-On have had a 52x burner out for weeks! I can get it here in
52x24x52.
War crimes, torture, lies, illegal spying... Would someone give Bush a blowjob, already, so he can be impeached?
If you really do this often, there are much better tools for this then you standing around swapping individual cd's.
Padus Discjuggler Professional has support for synchronous cd writing and supports robot arms for swapping discs.
Bad boys rape our young girls but Violet gives willingly.
I remember my 2x would do a full CD in 17.x minutes... then my 4x did them in 8.x... which made perfect mathmatic sense.. then my 12x did it in 3.x which was still close to making sense... now knowing that these "faster" drives speed up and slow doen depending on what area of the CD its on... and a 52x doing a full CD in 2.5 minutes... is that 1 minute worth the instability and chance of a bad burn? especially since for audio you should really keep it at 4 to make sure it works in all new and old players. its much like a VCR... SLP or EP gave you more time, but the quality was worse.... on the CDs... the faster it blows over that area, the less of a job it can be doing.. all its doing it trying to make dark spots.. doo it too fast, and they may not be dark enough, and your audio will skip more often than not.. for 1 week archives of data... its ok... but then of course on the job, the faster you do it, the more time you have for more work.. and who wants that? lol tell your manager that for data integrity sakes.. you need to burn at 1x and ensure that you watch it for 30 minutes to get a good burn. hehe.
Ok numnuts, how bout this. 48x liteon drive (the older 48/12/48 model) cheap peice of crap drive burns even 40x rated media at 48x. No C2 errors, No C1 errors. No errors on 2 different 40x pioneer DVD drives. No errors on a 5 year old Sony car CD player. No errors on a 1990 hifi CD player. No errors on a dreamcast. No errors on a laptop DVD drive. No errors anywhere. No buffer underruns. No coasters. More relibable than those precious slow plextors.
I've burned about 100 on my 52x24x52x lite-on cdrw, and have had mixed results. I had a 4x yamaha drive that died on me, and so when I went shopping I chose the 52x instead of the 48x lite-on (which was about $60 vs $80... still half the price of my yamaha 4x when I bought it) because the 48x only had 12x rewrite and the 52x has 24x rewrite. Well, anyways... back to the mixed results. Right before my 4x died I had bought 2 spindles of cheap PNY 16x CDRs. So when I got my new drive I decided to see what the burner would burn at on them, since it is supposed to limit its speed based on the media automatically. Well, about 1 in 20 burn at 24x, but the rest burn at 52x. With the first spindle, I never had a single error. With the second I've had about 1 in 5 give me errors toward the end of the disc. Anyways... I just pulled out 5 cds from the first spindle, and 5 from the second that were good (since I throw away any that burn bad) and tested them all with nero's tester, and every single one came up good. BTW, if I remember to set the speed down to 24x with these cds from the second spindle, they never give me a problem. So I think it's just a matter of them being rated for 16x.
What does this mean? with all 16x rated CDRs, I've had pretty damn good luck burning at 52x. I'm sure that if I got actual 48x or 52x (once they start appearing) CDRs, I would never have a problem. Overall I'm very happy with the burner, except that I now burn a lot more CDs than I used to, since it's now about 2.5 minutes (including lead-in and lead-out) instead of half an hour. =)
Nicodemus
At 52x, it does take 92 sec to burn a 700Mb CD-R. The article abruptly changes to RWs without notice. This is what the 2.5 minute burn time is referring to.
To continue ranting about this, the HotHardware article says the drive burns RWs at 24x, which translates to 3 1/3 minutes for a 700Mb RW, not 2.5 minutes.
that that is is that that is not is not
Working at Best Buy I've seen these on the shelf for several weeks by several different brands. This is old news.
Well, this is not 52X, this is 52X MAX. Just make the calculation :
At 1X, a 700MB CD was burn in 80mins
80/32 = 2.5. There you go. This burner is roughly equivalent to a 32X burner (that doesn't exist though, for vibration problems)
I have a 16X (Yamaha) and it REALLY burns a 700MB CD in 5min...
Write boring code, not shiny code!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
People have been remarking that there is an upper limit to the speed that CD drives can achieve. Neglecting expense, why not just have multiple lasers for read/write? Then you don't have to spin the actual disk too awfully fast, and risk shattering the media.
Actually.. your Yamaha probably overheated due to a design flaw in Yamaha CDRWs.
I've been following this issue for over 3 years now, and so far ALL TEN Yamaha drives that I've had info on (three owned by myself, the rest by people I know) have died. One 4x made it to 24 months, but none beyond that. Only ONE 6x or faster made it to 13 months; the rest died at an average age of 9 months. NONE had burned in excess of 100 CDRs, so they really hadn't worked very hard.
The problem is that the Yamaha does overheat, and this gradually warps the laser out of alignment.
Once the damage starts, sometimes it will seem to burn successfully, but the result can't be read in every drive, most notably in the Yamaha itself -- sometimes immediately, but in a couple cases the CDR failed after about 6 months (in cool dark storage, too). Later on, the CDRW will burn 1 or 2 disks successfully, but will refuse a 3rd. Power down and let it get dead-cold, and it will again work for 1 or 2 CDRs worth -- for a few months. Or it might burn the whole CDR, then croak during the TOC. Or it might seem to finish successfully, but on inspection you'll find it wrote many blank files. I've seen one or more of these symptoms from each of the dying Yamaha CDRWs.
In a machine that's powered on all the time, they die faster, probably because they're hot ALL the time. In a machine that's only on for the sole purpose of burning CDs -- that's the only Yamaha I've seen that made it to 24 months, and it recently died too.
(IDE and SCSI models are identical internally, as I found when I dismangled one of each, so that's not a factor here.)
I've reported this to Yamaha tech support, and got back "Thanks, good info." Er, well, I'd rather they'd fix the problem... but so far it hasn't happened.
My next purchase was a Plextor. Hopefully it'll do better.
BTW, EVERY antique CDRW that I've heard of still cranking 'em out after years and years of hard labour -- is a Ricoh.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
No, no, no, you're ruining my scavenging!! Let 'em all ditch their perfectly good 32x units, and I'll cheerfully gather 'em up, take 'em home, and use 'em til they die of old age. :)
Seriously, I have to agree, it's silly for the average person, who burns only a couple CDs a week, to care whether it's a 24x or a 52x. And myself, I'll take data integrity over speed any time.
I need to use my CDRs in lots of cranky old CDROM drives, so mine tend to get realworld testing on the spot.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
the faster you burn CD-Rs or CD-RWs, the lower quality the burn and less likelihood that any given device will be able to read it successfully.
what's the point? reading fast makes sense but writing beyond 16-24x is really risking your data.
I've broken the following CDs in various 40x-52x CD drives:
...and then I trashed the drive with a sledgehammer.
Unreal Tournament Disk 1
Quake 3 Arena
4 critical backups on CDRW media,
Why did I keep them so long? Because I wanted to burn CDs faster, much like whoever thought this story was a good post.
No longer.
12x ought to be enough for everyone ;)
640K ought to be enough for anyone....
hmm...
This is old news. I've had a 52x burner for about 2 months now. Sir Mixalot is still stuck back in the 90's.
My story is similar to yours.
Got a Yamaha 8x, it recently died so I held off. At UK prices, a reasonable DVD-R is now the same price as 2CDs. Or well under half the price per gb.
The DVD-R drive I bought is less than the CDR was 2 years ago.
You'd think we'd stop being surprised by technology by now wouldn't you.
My first cd burner was scsi based HP burner that did whopping 1x and supported only 650Mb media, I still use it occasionally to burn mp3s and other stuff that doesn't need to finish fast..
random buffer over/underruns are annoying and about 1/20 disks fail with it
My second drive was 4x mitsumi which has been one of the best purcashes I've done. Solid, stable and smooth burning all the way.
I've done over 1000 cd's with it and still it burns like it was new. Media failures during burn have been rare.. ~20 failed disks during that time
I recently bought my third burner, though it's *only* 40x it's still amazing to burn disk in 3 minutes and the error percent is almost zero because I use burnproof. Random fails have occurred, my box has just frozen into non-responsive state, but I blaim my testing/unstable debian from that
Funny, I have that same drive, and I havn't had nearly the same results :-)
Mighty picky about media up at these speeds, aren't they? (48X rated rather or otherwise). I think i'll just take the extra minute and burn at 32X, thank you.
-Chris
--an unbreakable toy is useful for breaking other toys--
as most poeple don't go to all the trouble to figure out how to properly order cdrs from korea.
Any store that wants to sell them has to pay duty.
And, uhh, what Canadian CD-R manufacturers are you talking about, exactly? Do we even have any?
Yeah.. some heavy users will, for sure. The bulk of sales a probably from compusmart and whatnot.
The CPCC is relatively recent in canada... were there more before it was implemented 3 years ago? I don't think so.
I have a 48x 24x 48x Hi-Val, and I got it about 2 months ago. Hi-Val are the cheapest drive you can get, not just in price. Being the cheap bastard that I am, I also buy the cheapest possible media to burn on that supports 48X and will go as low as media that supports 24x depending on what's cheapest. I have all of this running on an old 466 Celly. I often go online with my WinModem while buring CDs, this usually chews up 20-30% of my proc. Being the jerk that I am I always burn at max (48x) speed, regardless of media, and what not. In the 2 months that I've had this drive I burned 2 costers out of approximatly 350 cds. Just to add insult to injury, this is all running on a horribly screwed up 2 year old install of Windows 98, that my wife and kids use(abuse).
For everyone out there spending all of there hard earned dollars for supposed high quality drive and media..."your all idiots!!!"
The only valid reason to purcharce anything more than the cheapest priced drive that supports the speed you want is maybe compatibility with Linux.
Top scientists agree that with the present rate of consumption, the earth's
.. take baths instead. ... Keep them in one big pile.
supply of gravity will be exhausted before the 24th century. As man
struggles to discover cheaper alternatives, we need your help. Please...
CONSERVE GRAVITY
Follow these simple suggestions:
(1) Walk with a light step. Carry helium balloons if possible.
(2) Use tape, magnets, or glue instead of paperweights.
(3) Give up skiing and skydiving for more horizontal sports like curling.
(4) Avoid showers
(5) Don't hang all your clothes in the closet
(6) Stop flipping pancakes
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