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!"

Comments

Thanks, but no thanks.

[roka]

12x ought to be enough for everyone ;)

Re:Thanks, but no thanks.

[Blkdeath]

12x ought to be enough for everyone ;)

I've got myself a 24X burner, and I can burn a complete ~650MB ISO over my LAN (100BaseTX) in about 3:30 minutes. What more do I need?

n.b. I was just telling a colleague last night that "Within three or four months, drives will re-write as fast as mine can write." Whoa.. Egg on my face!

Re:Thanks, but no thanks.

[cscx]

All right, who's the asshole that's been modding all these level-headed posts down as "Troll?"

My 12X burner can burn a whole CD in just over 6 minutes. This one is up to .... 2.5?!?! I can hardly contain myself!!

Yeah, right.

Let's realize that they haven't factored in the cost of 52X certified media. Thanks but no thanks, I can spare the extra 4 minutes. Plus, at those speeds, God knows what the failure rate of burning is --- ever heard a 52X screamer CD-Rom go up to speed? You can keep this, Asus.

Re:Thanks, but no thanks.

[chamenos]

"Let's realize that they haven't factored in the cost of 52X certified media"

one thing i haven't really quite figured out is why the cdr media has to be "certified" up to a certain speed. the same way cars that can go faster have to make up for the increased speed with better tyres, aerodynamics, etc, shouldn't the increase in rotational speed of the cdrw drive be made up for by a stronger laser to make up for the decreased amount of time the cdr media is exposed to the laser?

don't mean to start another technical debate but i can't seem to figure this one out.

Re:Thanks, but no thanks.

[cscx]

If you're mass producing CDs, you *won't* be using a consumer CD burner anyway.

Re:Thanks, but no thanks.

[Cyno01]

There were some studies done a while ago that found cheap media would disintegrate at speeds faster than 48x. I dont think i'd trust my 200 CD-Rs that i got for $3 to work properly in anything faster than 24x.

Re:Thanks, but no thanks.

[handsomepete]

Geez, I thought I'd never find this. It shows the testing procedure for CD-R/RW media by Sony (which put together the Orange Book standards with Philips (and Kodak?)). That should give a little insight as to what's being tested and what would have to be modified to work at a faster speed. I've also wondered about this. Hope it helps.

Re:Thanks, but no thanks.

[ergo98]

The "niche" is that it becomes the new norm, just like every other improvement in computer technology. Did printers stop at 1 ppm because "who needs faster"?

Personally I can absolutely see the use of these. Every now and then I have to transfer large amounts of data between locations, and I usually am just about to leave at a moments notice (i.e. I'm working on something and Bob drops by) so I want to quickly spin off a backup to bring with me. The difference between 1 minute and 6 seconds and 5 minutes is HUGE in that situation, just as it's huge when you're printing off a big report, even though that 1ppm printer is great when you're only printing off the odd page.

Re:Thanks, but no thanks.

[Tokerat]

Not only the laser, but the disc itself can't wobble too much, or crack, distort, or break from the pressure of rotating so fast. If the manufacturing process makes the disc unstable in any way at those speeds to th epoint of not being reliable, it doesn't matter how good of a laser you have.

It's like trying to read the newspaper while driving in Boston: Not only do you have to keep read the same word over and over just to get it, but you're just askng to crash ;-)

Re:Thanks, but no thanks.

[quintessent]

So a single "reference" recorder is used to do a bunch of tests on a total of 10 discs. That seems rather scant to me.

Re:Thanks, but no thanks.

[ncc74656]

A friend of mine said he got a 52x burner, and he burned a full CD in 20 seconds.

It wasn't a full CD if it took only 20 seconds...hell, it takes longer than that just to start and stop the burn process. My 48x burner takes 2:40 or so to fill an 80-minute CD; a 52x burner might shave a few seconds off of that, but it's not going to be the huge speed boost you imply.

LED magic

[peculiarmethod]

'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

Re:LED magic

[twoshortplanks]

Seriously, this would be a great idea. I'm partially red/green colourblind, and to me the amber and the green lights look the same. And I'm not alone - 10% of the male population have the same complaint.

Question

[Marxist Commentary]

Are these just tricked up 48x drives like the 52x CD-ROM drives of a few years ago?

Re:Question

[ncc74656]

the speed is the top speed on the inside track IIRC

It burns faster toward the outside of the CD. Near the hub, the most you'll get will be 16x or so.

Great!

[MonTemplar]

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...

Re:Great!

[hackstraw]

Here here! I only have a 12x burner and have burned hundreds of cds, almost all of them at 8x. Why? So I can reliably multitask and do something else while the burn is going on. When cdrecord ejects the disk, I take the one that just finished, label it, and put it in a stack with the rest and slap another one in the drive, rinse repeat. I was never in a hurry to burn a cd, I guess because I could burn them faster than I could listen/archive them. Oh yeah, etree rocks!

Re:Great!

[SN74S181]

It doesn't really matter. The main thing is to push the envelope, so that anybody staggeringly stupid enough to buy the 'top end' drive pushes down the price on the nice 36x drives the rest of us will purchase.

Re:Great!

[antirename]

Plextors rock! My 24X burner has never made a coaster, even when playing Tux Racer with the burner running in the background. Its "burn-proof" feature seems to actually work (unlike a couple of other brands I've tried).

Re:Great!

[saskboy]

I can hardly wait until the 100X drives come out.
Then I don't have to wait for the Sun to melt my CDs, because the drive will do it for me :-)

Yes but,

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Yes but,

[SteweyGriffin]

I try to work out a lot, but sometimes it gets hard after a long strenuous work day. The one thing that does get me there time and time again is a good CD mix of my favorite (new) songs. Good music is key to a good workout.

That being said, I do want to burn my CDs in less than 10 minutes. I have a 32X burner so that I can make them in 2 minutes after quickly deciding what to put onto my new personal greatest hits CD.

I guess I could even make the (stretching it, I know) claim that my 32X burner has saved my life (or at least cut a few years off) due to the rigorous exercise that it has encouraged.

Re:Yes but,

[jridley]

What are you talking about? I've been buying name brands on sale (typically $6 to $8 per 100 after rebate) and they've all been 48X certified for quite a while now. I didn't personally think that 8 cents a disc was a "ghastly price."

Re:Yes but,

[ncc74656]

When you have a week's worth of (for instance) Deep Space Nine eps ripped from your TiVo that you want to burn to SVCD, being done with the job in 15 minutes (not counting the encoding time...just burning time) instead of an hour would be nice. That's where faster burners are useful.

It's no great shock

[stratjakt]

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.

Re:It's no great shock

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually they are using CLV, but it is Z-CLV (Zone-CLV) burning usually starts around 16x, then ramps up to 20x a little ways into the disc, then to 24x, and so on. If you're only burning a half full disc, you'll never hit the zone where u get into the higher speeds. I wish they would stop with this Z-CLV crap and just do plain old CLV. If they used 52X CLV, then a disc would be able to be burned in about a minute and a half. Z-CLV requires the burner to actually stop burning, spin the disc up to the next zone speed, and then resume the burn. This stopping and starting can introduce errors in the disc, however they are usually taken care of by the ECC built into the ISO9660 format, The error correction on Audio CDs isn't as sophisticated, so u can sometimes hear pops on the disc where the burner stopped and restarted. Also since the error connection is being used to fix errors purposely put there by the burner, it leaves less correction to fix what it was put there for, the scratches that are usually inevitable throughout the life of the disc. If you want to burn discs without this Z-CLV crap, then burn at 16x or lower, 16x or lower on most Z-CLV burners is usually CLV mode. So 1x-16x=CLV, >16x =Z-CLV

Re:It's no great shock

[ottffssent]

I'm sorry, but that's not +5 informative, it's -1 misinformed.

First, some terms.

CLV = Constant Linear Velocity. The original audio CD standard specified a constant datarate, which meant that the disc spun faster at the center tracks and slower at the outside. This was fine, since CDs mostly played linearly through, and even if you switched tracks, there was time for the drive motor to adjust the speed.

CAV = Constant Angular Velocity. The disc spins at the same RPMs no matter what part is being read. This requires a much less powerful drive motor and allows for random access.

There are others too, such as P-CAV (partial CAV) and Z-CLV (zone CLV), but the main distinction is between CLV and CAV.

Suppose a CD burner were to operate in CLV mode like the AC proposes. The inner tracks, being 1/6 as long as the outer tracks, would have to spin very fast to achieve the desired datarate. But, CDs cannot spin much past 10K RPM or they will self-destruct (and some do anyway). So, if the inner tracks are spinning at 10K, the outer tracks must spin at 10K/6 = about 1500RPM in order to maintain the constant linear velocity. But the drive motor and media can keep up with 10K RPM speeds, so why limit them to 1500RPM?

If CD burners were CAV on the other hand, the drive would maintain a constant 10K RPM and the burner would fire the laser for a slightly different durration each time it writes a pit so the pits end up being the same length on the final CD. But that's hard to do over a continously variable linear speed (RPMs * track length = linear speed). So, the burners use Z-CLV. The drive motor spins up to 10K and writing starts; it slows down slightly to compensate for the tracks lengthening, so the burner can write each pit the same length. When the zone ends, the burner again ramps up to 10K RPM and the process continues at a higher datarate.

The AC seems to think that 24X means the disc is spinning slower than 30X, and he's being cheated on the inner tracks which start writing slowly. That's just not true. The disc spins just as fast on the inner zone as it does on the outer zone (and maybe faster, as there's less turbulence and disc wiggle there!), but the tracks are so short that not much data gets written per revolution.

It is true that substantially more bits are dedicated to ECC under ISO9660 than under the CD-AUDIO standard. However, this does not imply that audio CDs are more succeptible to error. Just the opposite, in fact. CDs were never intended to be a random-access format, so when ISO9660 came along and wanted random access, considerable effort went into making it work, such as the extra ECC and positioning information in subchannels. Moreover, data requires that each bit be reproduced accurately. Audio has no such requirement. So, when an audio CD player cannot read a bit, it performs correction by interpolating from the previous and next samples on the disc (or by some other, more accurate, method). This cannot be done with data, which is another reason why so much ECC is required for data CDs. Have you noticed that you can run an audio CD over in your car, buff it out a bit, and play through just fine? Ever tried that with the CD you write your backups to?

I hope I've been informative. And moderators? Please don't moderate what you don't understand!

my honest opinion

[MoceanWorker]

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..

Re:my honest opinion

[garcia]

Over the years I have gone through several CDRW's 4x RICOH died and wouldn't write past the first track but would continue to read just fine, 32x Que! or something died in 3 months, and now I got a new 40x CDRW w/a new computer... The kernel reports that it is a 40x burner but the fastest it will burn is about 27x.

I am afraid to even attempt to buy a DVD burner for fear of it burning a single DVD and dying w/no chance of replacement :(

Re:my honest opinion

[MoceanWorker]

have you tried downloading the newest ASPI drivers?

btw, what's the OS you're running at?

my father recently bought a 48X CD-RW (24x48x48) burner.. and he's still running Windows 95 on a Pentium-200.. it burns fine, but will only burn at most 24, IIRC.. yet he has no probs burning..

Re:my honest opinion

[rufo]

Many burners have a safety feature that only lets you burn as fast as the burner thinks the media can handle. Try different media; it may up the speed to 40x. There's also sometimes a software command to turn it off, although I don't know where that would be, and you run the risk of having iffy burnt CDs. This is under NERO on Windows; I don't know how it works under Linux/*BSD/. (I'm mainly a Mac OS X person myself, and I have a DVD-R in my machine; I just do a bit of work on the side on Windows.)

Also, I don't believe most burners actually burn at anywhere near 40x for most of the CD... for the inside of the disc, they burn at a slower speed, then keep upping it until they hit 40x near the end. Basically the same thing most cheapo 52x readers do.

Just a few thoughts. :)

Re:my honest opinion

[Jeff DeMaagd]

Also, I don't believe most burners actually burn at anywhere near 40x for most of the CD... for the inside of the disc, they burn at a slower speed, then keep upping it until they hit 40x near the end. Basically the same thing most cheapo 52x readers do.

That's part of my beef with CD writers. They can't really spin the CD much faster without risking shattering the media, so obviously CLV type writing would only slow things down, and a 40x drive doesn't end up being anywhere nearly twice as fast as a 20x because they have to ramp-up. My solution is to find a quality product line and buy the slowest rated version. I can stand to wait an additional 10% of time on a CD burn to save even as much as $40. The higher speed rated media is sometimes more expensive too.

One benefit of a faster rated drive being released is that it does push down the prices of the slower drives.

Re:my honest opinion

[MoceanWorker]

yeah.. i realized a lil too late the parent poster who i replied to was referring to linux as well :-)

What is the limit where...

[Sponge Bath]

the media falls apart and send shards of plastic into your jugular and eye socket?

Re:What is the limit where...

[ThatKidYouDid]

I think the limit is around 60x, although I have seen many older cd's or cd's that are well used fly apart in a 56x. I suppose you could probably go a bit faster than 60x, but you'd need specialized media.

Re:What is the limit where...

[jez9999]

New tungsten steel CD-RW 800x disc?

Awesome

[cioxx]

This sounds a like a perfect recipe for Senseless Explosion

That's great and all, but...

[NineNine]

... 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.

Re:That's great and all, but...

[NineNine]

Part of the problem is that drives have no buffering, and the whole thing is reliant on the CPU. It's tough to burn CD's at a decent speed unless you have a 1Ghz+ (Intel speeds) CPU. And even then, from reading the other posts, it sounds like I'm not the only one with problems burning at higher speeds.

Re:That's great and all, but...

[Blkdeath]

.. 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.

Enter BurnProof<tm>! While my Athlon XP1800+ and WD ATA100 hard drive rarely have trouble feeding my burner data at the full 24X, if the system is really busy the burn slows down. I've tested burning CDs while booting a VMWare Windows 2000 session and haven't produced a coaster yet. I also very rarely drop below 20X burn speed. The 32X at work is similar (and on a lower-powered Athlon, no less) but still doesn't often drop below 30X.

Of course, were I burning an audio CD I'd likely drop the speed down to about 8X anyways, because some CD players don't appear able to read discs burned greater than that (the 10 CD changer in a friend's car, for example).

Re:That's great and all, but...

[Dion]

> It's tough to burn CD's at a decent speed unless you have a 1Ghz+ (Intel speeds) CPU

Uh? I guess that's true if you are running an OS with horrible latencies, but I have yet to make a coaster under Linux (yes it has/had latency issues, but not as bad as other OSs).

A long time ago, when burning at 2x was not-horrible, I started burning a disk and then started Quake 2 on my old P166 with a 3dfx voodoo card and too little RAM, I ran around a few levels while the sound went choppy and the framerate sucked, but the buffer fill on the burner never went below 89%.

Think about it, burning at 2x means having the CPU move 352800 bytes pr. second, any CPU ought to handle that, burning at 50x means moving 8613 KB/s, not exactly high-throughput in todays world, so it all comes down to one thing: "Scheduling Latency", it doesn't matter much how fast your CPU is if your OS is crappy about the latency.

Re:That's great and all, but...

[adolf]

Just buy a Plextor. I've been using their 8x PR-820 drive for almost four years to the day.

A few thousand burns later, I've got no trouble to report except with a bad batch of Verbatim media toward the end of 1999.

And, mind you, this is for all manner of material -- from PSX archiving to music production to bulk duplication, usually on the cheapest media I can find. I've never burned at less than maximum speed.

YMMV, HTH. But given this experience I'm not likely to ever buy anything other than Plextor in the future -- that is, if this drive ever dies so that I can justify replacing it.

Re:That's great and all, but...

[teamhasnoi]

You might want to investigate a LG drive, I had one for about a year. You could probably find a 24x at Walmart for 50! bucks. Works great, supports overburning, and only gave me errors when I burned a XtraPersonal copy of "Wind Blows: Zamphir, Master of the Pan Flute" at max speed. (5-7 minutes)

Re:That's great and all, but...

[jridley]

Dude, you're doing something wrong. I burn at 32X all the time and it's been hundreds of discs since I've burned a coaster. I burn at least 2 or 3 discs a day, sometimes as many as 30 or 40 if I'm doing duping runs.

I used to burn lots of coasters until I gave up on crap quality blanks. I just buy Imations and Fujis when they're on sale for like $3 for 50 after rebate, and haven't had a problem since.

When I was buying the $4 for 200 unbranded crap at Office Clone, yeah, I was throwing away 10 out of 50, even burning at 8x.

I'm using a Sanyo OEM burner and a Teac laptop burner (which is only 24X) and a JVC 32X at work. The Sanyo was cheap and works as well as any recorder I've ever used.

Always buy a drive with buffer underrun protection. If you're burning under Windows, make sure the drive is running in DMA mode, not PIO, or you'll have about 300 underruns burning a disc over 8X. Also beware; Windows sometimes SAYS it's in DMA mode but really it's in PIO; check Google for registry tweaks to fix it.

Re:That's great and all, but...

[FireballFreddy]

Bunk. I've been running a Pentium Pro 200 MHz since 1996 and I can burn at 40x no problem. But I don't try to do anything else during the process, I buy quality media, and I have a quality drive. If you buy no-name media and a no-name drive then you're asking for trouble.

-FF

Re:That's great and all, but...

[antirename]

Plextor drives are very good. I've made one coaster, and that was a software problem (Roxio on Windows). It's burned hundreds of cd's with xcdroast, and never made a coaster. I can surf the web, play a game, whatever while it's burning and it doesn't seem to care.

Re:That's great and all, but...

[kinnunen]

I burn at 32X all the time and it's been hundreds of discs since I've burned a coaster.

And can you read those disc with an old 2x or 4x reader? Can you read the data on the discs ten years from now? The cold harsh truth is that more speed = lower quality. It may not come out a coaster but, it is still lower quality than a disc burned at 4x. And of course it's even worse if you have a buffer underrun - BurnProof may save the disc from becomming a coaster but you still end up with errors on the disc. Sure, the errors are correctable now, but in five years when the disc has had some physical wear and sunlight...

If durabilty and compatibilty is at all important to you, use quality media and burn at low speed.

Re:That's great and all, but...

[ozbird]

I just buy Imations...

Imations fall squarely into the "crap quality blanks" bucket IMO. I bought a pack of 10 Imations: four were scratched beyond use inside their wrappers (there were plastic? particles in one or two of the cases); half of the remaining disks made coasters burning at their rated speed. I reported the problem to them (so they can fix their QA procedures), but heard nothing back. Never again!

I've had good results with Kodak Digital Science blanks with the Infoguard protection layer (gold instead of blue/green/cyan.) For everyday stuff, I use GoTech: cheap, and so far good results with CD-Rs and CD-RWs.

Re:That's great and all, but...

[ivan256]

Can you read the data on the discs ten years from now?

The sad reality is that nobody can burn a CD-R and use it regularly and still have it work everywhere in ten years. Not on any drive, not on any media.

High quality media burned at 8x is just as good as one burned at 2x. The laser is pulsed for exactly the same amount of time, but they've figured out how to reduce the amount of time the laser needs to be off so it can be pulsed again.

If longevity is important to you you need to keep the media in a dark, dry, 60 degree vault and not touch the disks. Any regular use will reduce the lifespan of any currently available disk to less than 5 years.

Re:That's great and all, but...

[NeMon'ess]

if you have two cd or dvd drives on the same ide channel the two will fight and fuck up your burning. the cd-r drive doesn't have to be a master of the channel but its not a bad idea.

How to shatter a cd at 100x

[Anonymous Coward]

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...

Re:How to shatter a cd at 100x

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually it's more like 40-something times the spin speed of the original CD drives at which CDs shatter. There was an article about this on Slashdot a while ago. I tried searching for it to provide a link, but I couldn't find it.
Many CD drives today are labled as being "52x" as if it means they spin 52x as fast as the earliest 1x caddy cd drives (horrible things).
What they're actually refering to is a 52x (at peak) the transfer rate of the original CD drives, which if I remember rightly, was about ~150kb/s. My "2x" in 1995 could do 360kb/s.

Re:How to shatter a cd at 100x

[SN74S181]

As an addendum to the above:

An excellent prank to play on a coworker or roomate is to put an extremly out of balance CD in their drive with the machine powered off. When the machine comes on the drive will spin up and scare the hell out of them.

Re:How to shatter a cd at 100x

[mindstrm]

How do you transfer data at 52x the speed if you can't even read it that fast off the disc?

The only way to read data at 52x the speed is to spin it 52x as fast....

Re:How to shatter a cd at 100x

[An Ominous Cow Erred]

The Kenwood TrueX drives were spectacularly unreliable.

While they could read glass-pressed CD-ROMs at insane speeds, they suffered horribly at reading CD-Rs, dropping to single digit read speeds. The real problem though came from the fact that the Kenwood TrueX drive didn't really use multiple laser assemblies. Instead, it used a single laser and a beam splitter to create multiple beams. The beam-splitter assembly frequently failed, sometimes only a month into use. Kenwood was eventually slapped with a class-action lawsuit because of this.

I do wish someone would build true multi-laser drives, but so far nobody has.

Re:How to shatter a cd at 100x

[Reziac]

Until, of course, I'm forced to kill you for ruining my CD drive :)

Re:How to shatter a cd at 100x

[mindstrm]

Ahh. So this uses multiple lasers, eh? Got a spec sheet?

Multiple lasers might let you read data at twice the rate, but not data you can use, unless you are copying. If I have a stream of data on the CD, and I want all of it, now, I can't very well simply get that stream twice as fast by using two lasers.

Ummm...

[damiam]

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.

comparison to LiteOn 52x?

[h0tblack]

I wonder how this compares to other 52x drives out there like the LiteOn 52x24x52?

Re:comparison to LiteOn 52x?

[suss]

I wonder how this compares to other 52x drives out there like the LiteOn 52x24x52?

It's probably the same drive, rebranded as Asus.

Re:comparison to LiteOn 52x?

[z4ce]

I'll second this analysis of Asus. I have an Athlon XP 2100+, Asus A7V333 (w/ ATA-RAID, firewire, usb 2, sound). I bought Crucial PC2100 RAM (and accordingly, ran it the PC2100 timings). Run at the default clock speed, the box would hang during linux and windows 2000 boot sequence. To get it to boot, I had to actually underclock my computer by 1mhz. And, I'm using ALL high quality components. But, 1mhz isn't hardly worth RMA'ing things.

Then I STILL had stability problems in X (and windows apps that used 3D.) I had to lower the AGP 'drive' strength from its default settings (and lower than the recommended nvidia settings). And, I had to disable the parallel port to get return to Castle Wolfenstein to not crash (!?).

Now, however, everything is perfectly stable. I've gone upwards of 45days without rebooting, and only then to boot into windows to do stuff.

Ian

Yea but....

[Chicane-UK]

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.

Re:Yea but....

[Reziac]

Could that by any chance be a DVD drive thing? Cuz I burn at 24x in my Plextor, and every crappy old CDROM drive can read the result (and I still have 2x CDROMs in service here). But I don't have any DVD drives to compare against.

Slashdot has gotten stupid...

[alienw]

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.

Re:Slashdot has gotten stupid...

[Ed Avis]

2.5 minutes is good, but you still need someone to sit there and change the CDs over. Are there any CD robots which can change the disc over and start burning another? That could fill the middle ground between an ordinary CD burner and a big CD pressing plant.

You could have an automated setup that burns the latest Debian unstable every fifteen minutes...

Re:Slashdot has gotten stupid...

[Paul Komarek]

We bought one of these lite-ons at CompUSA on special about a month ago. They ran out of a slower Buslink drive they had advertised, and sold us a 52x Buslink for $100 instead (it's a rebranded lite-on). It seems to work pretty well so far with the memorex media we've been using, but I can't say we've stressed it much (it's in a test machine).

-Paul Komarek

Re:Slashdot has gotten stupid...

[JLester]

We use the RImage Desktop product to duplicate our CDs. Load up 50 blanks in the hopper and start burning. The arm grabs a CD, puts it in the printer to print the label, removes it from the printer and puts it in the drive, burns the CD, and places it in the output hopper. The model we have is pretty old and is SCSI based. Their new ones are Firewire and much faster than ours. We plan on upgrading in the spring.

Jason

Re:Slashdot has gotten stupid...

[bogie]

"Secondly, even 24x drives burn a cd in 2.5 minutes."

Maybe if those cd's are 300MB, otherwise a real 650-700MB cd will take a minimum of 3:45 to burn a full cd at 24X. The only ones that can burn a full disc in 2:30 minutes ARE the 52X drives. Unless of course you were ignoring leadin and leadout or finalizing, which of course makes no sense sine they are part of the burn process.

The Case of the Exploding CD-ROM

[5n3ak3rp1mp]

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."

Re:The Case of the Exploding CD-ROM

[Zog The Undeniable]

Well, that's me sold - I can turn AOL CDs into pretty mulch for my garden!

is this really an improvement?

[EvilStein]

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?"

Re:is this really an improvement?

[Cyno01]

Try sticking a paperclip in the emergency eject hole while a 48x drive is kicked up to speed, it will ricochet around the room for some time. Great fun with AOL CDs.

Re:is this really an improvement?

[atam]

Sounds like a good cause for a litigation lawsuit. You better saved your evidences. Where is the lawyer?

2.5 Minutes?

[anonicon]

That's still a lot slower than the matter generator on Star Trek. When the hell are we going to get those? :-D

Re:2.5 Minutes?

[Ziviyr]

2.5 minutes = 150 seconds.

700 megabytes * 1024 / 150 = ~4779KB/sec.

4779 K/sec / 150 K/sec = ~32X speed.

Wake me up when we get 40x burners...

Re:2.5 Minutes?

[sean23007]

Uhhh... 64x?

You can tell something is obsolete when...

[the eric conspiracy]

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.

Re:You can tell something is obsolete when...

[Anonymous Coward]

products don't become obsolete when they get perfected, they become commodities.

Re:You can tell something is obsolete when...

[the eric conspiracy]

unless you shelled out $1500 for a car DVD player

Car DVD players are $150, not $1500.

http://www.mp3playerstore.com/stuff_you_need/dvd /I n-dash.htm

Re:News for pirates. Stuff that's illegal

[pkphilip]

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..

Faster than what?

[travail_jgd]

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.

Not that much faster ...

[jetlag11235]

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 --

Re:Some of us

[mondoterrifico]

It's quite amusing that you associate mp3's with thievery. Kinda shows that the brainwashing by the Recording Industry has been quite successfull.

What about...

[atomico]

... a CD-RW drive that lasts more than two years, even with light use? And records reliably?

That would be sooo nice... maybe our grandchildren will see it :)

Re:What about...

[ruiner13]

Um... I have a yamaha 4x SCSI burner that I got waaaaay back (when 4x was as fast as they could get to work) and it still works perfectly (albeit not as fast as my 24x Yamaha ATAPI drive I got for my other computer). Perhaps you should try a reputable brand instead of the Wal-Mart blue-light specials if you expect reliability and durability.

Re:What about...

[belroth]

Plextor - PlexWriter 12/10/32A
Ricoh - MP6200S (2/2/6 SCSI)

Both still working OK.

Re:What about...

[jridley]

I have a QPS drive (made by Sanyo) that I've had for about 2 years, but it's had very heavy use, burning probably 3000 discs in that time, and it's still running fine.
We have a bank of Plextor 8X recorders at work in the data conversions room that have burned something on the order of 15 discs a day for several years. Admittedly, these were replacements for crap-o Teac recorders; we had 15 of them and ALL of them failed between 1 and 6 months after the warranty expired.

Re:What about...

[Chemical]

That's funny. My Yahama 4x SCSI in my PC at work had the eject mechanism break. It did get constant use for over a year though. I also had an old Sony 2x SCSI in my PC years back that also had the eject mechanism break. But this thing was OG. It used CD Caddies. The caddy got stuck inside and I couldn't get it out. Quite sad.

Re:What about...

[mgblst]

Still have my trusty Traxdata SCSI, 2x2x4.... works with no problems, but that may be because it is a pain in the ass to boot to windows 98, and wait 30 minutes to burn a CD.

Re:What about...

[jedrek]

Yeah... my two year old, $250 8x4x24 SCSI drive died, so I replaced it with a $55 32x10x40 LG IDE drive. I burned about 800 discs in the SCSI drive and about 300 discs in the IDE drive so far. Even if it craps out tomorrow, I'll still be ahead on my 'high quality' Yamaha drive. And if it doesn't... well, all the better.

One coaster on my LG so far: my computer crashed because of a faulty RAM chip (replaced) while I was burning some backups. The Yamaha gave me quite a few coasters, all thanks to seriously defragmented disc drives and 'great' ideas like doing NLE while I was burning.

Re:Some of us

[Chanc_Gorkon]

No he isn't associating MP3's with theviery. He's associating having MP3's from cd's he does not own with thievery. Big difference.

Re:Some of us

[stud9920]

I know what you mean. I feel the same way when every article about bigger hard disks or faster network connections is accompanied with a porn joke.

every article about bigger hard disks or faster network connections ARE porn

Re:Yea but.... [OT]

[Chicane-UK]

Going OT here, but what deck is it you have? Wouldn't be a Pioneer unit by chance? :)

Just memorize everything.

[Futurepower(R)]

"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.

Re:Just memorize everything.

[SN74S181]

In the 60's and 70's there were manual card-punches you could use to modify punched cards one column at a time. Slow, but it sure beat waiting in the line at the library for your turn at one of the two IBM keypunches available when your FORTRAN programming assignment is due the next morning.

I would say that would be a better method than the #2 pencil, and more relevant to this discussion of computer-oriented storage.

I have a friend who worked at a place where they used a Frieden Flexowriter to do their word processing. It stored documents on punched paper tape. There was one secretary who was skilled in the craft of splicing the punched paper tape. It was her job to edit and update form letters stored on paper tape.

Re:If you buy a fast CR-W, you SUPPORT the RIAA!

[stienman]

The subsidies are for audio CD-Rs only. You can buy a pack of regular CD-Rs and burn audio on them, but home cd audio recorders (component audio equipment) won't record to them.

-Adam

Actually...

[Tuxinatorium]

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

Obligatory Simpsons reference

[graveyhead]

CowboyNeal: It can burn a cd in 2.5 minutes.

Homer: Aww 2.5 minutes. I want it now!

update...

[Tuxinatorium]

Now It's down to $70, and the equivalent Asus model is $79

Theoretical Limits?

[ZeLonewolf]

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...

great!

[gumbi west]

Come on people this is really amazing! a 9% increase! This is as great as when we went from 2x to 2.18x.

Re:To Both your Re:s, Local Musicians!!!

[Cyno01]

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.

Re:What is the point of this ever-increasing speed

[belroth]

Just how fast do these things actually need to be ?

I mean, are we so pressed for time that we have to speed up everything ?

By that logic why do you need anything faster than 1x?
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.

Pardon my Ignorance

[Stigmata669]

But shouldn't we measure CD-R speeds in multiples of burn time rather than CVA? Problems like this lame release would be solved. 1x burner... 70 min for a 70 min cd. 2x = 35 min. etc. Thus a burner that creates a cd in 2.5 minutes is 28x.

Thus the headline should read 28.32x burner released, compared with 28x, saves you 15 seconds!!

Re:Pardon my Ignorance

[mindstrm]

No...
Lead in/out is irrelevant. He's saying that if a drive can burn a cd in 2.5 minutes, it's 28 times faster than one that can do it in 70 minutes (the reference).. therefore, is a 28x burner, by definition (rather than look at max spindle speed)

Re:Advice

[belroth]

If you are primarily concerned with audio cd quality then check out Yamaha. Tom's hardware did some analysis on their unique (afaik) audio mastering features a while back.

Law of Decreasing Return With 90% Chance of Rant

[shoemakc]

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... ...that's right, not even 2% faster. Factor in that it's hard to find media that will consistantly burn properly at those speeds, and well, what's the point?

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

Re:News for pirates. Stuff that's illegal

[belroth]

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.?

Re:Great... maybe

[jridley]

Then something is wrong. The drive is maybe in PIO mode rather than DMA. I burn at 16X all the time, through the network from a samba share on a 350 MHz box running Linux to a P4 laptop. If I'm burning from local I burn at 24 or 32X with no trouble. At work we have a 700 MHz machine with twin 32X burners running under Nero; the 700 has NO trouble feeding both drives without underrunning if burning from local hard drive, and this is all IDE equipment.

Also you need a drive with buffer underrun protection; not always needed but if you do have a cron job kick in and cause you to underrun, at least it doesn't wreck the disc, it just takes an extra minute to burn.

Re:can we get a tray with that ?

[jridley]

So go on eBay and buy a carousel autofeeder from a dot.bomb selloff. A guy at work bought one for $100 (though shipping cost $75 or so). Apparently there are a lot of these for sale up there. 100 disc feed, run by serial port. A quick perl script and you're off to the races.

Yay Yamaha!

[Pope]

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.

Lite-On Drives

[badasscat]

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.

Blah blah blah

[Peaker]

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.

52X not new...

[Kymermosst]

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!

Re:Only in the United States

[mindstrm]

Yes
And in Canada, the rate for CDR is much, much lower than that for audio CDR. IT's still silly, but it's not a big deal.

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.

Shattered CD

[Born2Die]

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

Problematic...

[gweihir]

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....

Diminishing Returns

[NeuroManson]

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.

Do the math

[FearUncertaintyDoubt]

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.

Re:What is the point of this ever-increasing speed

[belroth]

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.

Wow but not really

[RAMMS EIN]

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...

Been to Best Buy lately?

[hendridm]

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.

Re:Been to Best Buy lately?

[Reziac]

I first saw a 52x Lite-On back about -- July, I think. Anyway, it's been a few months.

Clues for the clueless

[jridley]

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.

Re:Plextors used to rock.....

[antirename]

I hadn't heard that... if this is true, I guess I won't be updating the firmware :) Do you have a link for this? This would seem like a stupid decision for a company like Plextor... you pay extra because you can depend on it to "just fricking work", whether you're backing up an audio CD or your work files. If they really have crippled them, it doesn't work for a lot of what I would need anymore (Ever had an NT server disk get scratched and try to get a replacement?) and I would buy another brand.

Oh yeah?

[coloth]

I can format my 50KB drum in 23 minutes!

I just got a similar model...It's worth it to me.

[SacredNaCl]

Of course, my upgrade was pretty severe...

From an External CD/RW that was 4x4x2 ...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.

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.

The problem with these CD-RW reviews....

[An Ominous Cow Erred]

...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.

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..... ...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?

Re:52X - no thanx

[jridley]

Please read my "clues for the clueless" post.

Huh?

[Shanep]

Just when you think you couldn't burn those shared MP3s any faster, Asus comes out with a 52X Burner.

Lite-On have had a 52x burner out for weeks! I can get it here in .au for about $150.

52x24x52.

Re:Law of Decreasing Return With 90% Chance of Ran

[Nicodemus]

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

100x or better CD drives, just use multiple lasers

[PeterM from Berkeley]

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.

Yamaha: 10 CDRWs, 10 premature deaths.

[Reziac]

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.

Re:Yamaha: 10 CDRWs, 10 premature deaths.

[Reziac]

Just be sure to let me know when your Yamaha dies :)

I bought mine (SCSI) because the reviews were so good and the company had a history of durable electronics. Surprise!! Died at 11 months. Warranty replacement -- died at 9 months. (Also had a 4x IDE I got from a friend, and it died at about 24 mos, but hadn't burned more than a dozen disks.) That's when I started taking notes. Friend had two die on about the same timespan (the 2nd was about the same age as yours but had far less use).

Even really bad designs seldom have a 100% failure rate, so I'm sure there are *some* out there that are still working.. OTOH, give it 6 months and test your burned CDs for data integrity. Might get a rude surprise. :(

Re:Yamaha: 10 CDRWs, 10 premature deaths.

[Reziac]

Too bad about the Ricoh. It probably would have outlived you, had it not met with misfortune. I don't know who actually makes the Creative CDRWs, but the clone dealers here pretty much stopped carrying 'em early on, which is generally a bad sign. (Most dealers here carry mostly Lite-On and Plextor. I've asked about the Lite-On drives, and dealers I trust have told me so far they've not had any trouble with 'em.)

Hopefully your disks are indeed all good and will stay that way! I always make duplicates in case one doesn't cut the mustard, and I use TDK media which doubtless helps (BTW the dying Yamaha managed to eke out a few more disks with TDK even tho it was refusing Kodak media outright -- had to pull data off to write to another machine, so if the disk lasted 10 minutes it was progress :)

Old SB16 multimedia kits usually came with a 2x Panasonic, or less often, a Sony CDROM. My old 2x (of early 1994 vintage) is a Panasonic. It finally croaked at age 6 of a broken drive belt, which I haven't got around to replacing (easy to do, tho). It has a true 16bit proprietary driver and could not read multisession disks, but did fine on single-session CDRs.

My truck doesn't even have a media player, and my car has (are you sitting down?) an 8-track. I feel old. :)

Re:Yamaha: 10 CDRWs, 10 premature deaths.

[Reziac]

I've got somewhere around 50gb of data scattered among various machines. CDR backups have long since reached the "omighod" stage so CDR mostly gets used for whoppin' big chunks of personal files, and as a giant floppy disk. I've been scared off RAID as such by the recovery issues if a drive or controller dies, but I am planning to set up a system whose sole mission in life will be to mirror contents of the work boxen's HDs.

Geez, every time backup media capacity gets close to adequate, HD sizes take a Giant Leap Forward!! And as we all know, junk fills the space allotted!

Re:Yamaha: 10 CDRWs, 10 premature deaths.

[Reziac]

I'll be networking my mess Real Soon Now, and something like what you're doing is what I have in mind -- dump updates to a HD (or better yet, HD and mirror HD) in the backup box.

Heh, now you know why I prefer to wait for the scabs to form rather than buying bleeding edge! And I guess that explains why those DVD-RAM units are selling for under $100 new :)

Re:Yamaha: 10 CDRWs, 10 premature deaths.

[Reziac]

Oh, lordy, CADDIES... [runs away screaming]

Re:Yamaha: 10 CDRWs, 10 premature deaths.

[Reziac]

No idea. I don't even own a DVD player of any sort yet, let alone a DVD burner! (Tho since I have just one DVD, a reference disk from Novell, I'm not yet terribly motivated. :)

Re:Yamaha: 10 CDRWs, 10 premature deaths.

[compwiz3688]

Here's my info on my 8x8x24 Yamaha.

It's been running for two years now, and it's been annoying sometimes. I stick a Gigastorage CDR (light blue dye) but it won't recognize it in any Windows OS. If I stick the disc in while it's doing POST, it'll work. If I stick it in when I powered it up from the cold, it'll work. This doesn't happen with the other brands that I have, so it is possible that it's the CDR's fault.

However, there is a problem with the overheating. It's getting to 37C in the summer. It probably isn't as bad as my friend's AMD CPU at 50-60C though, but it is hotter than usual. I wasn't really expecting it to heat up while it was idle.

I got the CRW-F1 with my new system for this Christmas. Hopefully I'll have a better milage from it.

I remember reading in the manual that you need about 1/2" space above and below the unit. I can't find this statement in the CRW-F1 manual. Maybe they've learned their lesson from the overheating problems?

Re:Yamaha: 10 CDRWs, 10 premature deaths.

[Reziac]

That's in fact one of the things I notice about the Yamahas: they're relatively warm even when idle. And the newly-burned disk comes out quite a lot warmer than from my Plextor. Your observation that (if I read your post correctly) it only wants to work when started from dead cold sounds like the "I won't work after I get just so hot" problem which was an symptom for some of the failed drives.

My systems are all fairly roomy midtowers with extra cooling, and none of them run hot in the first place. And personally I don't think "1/2" space above and below" is a solution -- rather, it makes everyone else work around their problem. BTW there wasn't any such statement in my retail-box 6x's manual, which I wound up reading ALL of because I was looking for something or other that wasn't indexed.

If the new Plextor (well, about a year old now) doesn't prove more reliable, I'll probably move to buying last year's cheap Lite-On for $40, and consider it a disposable unit.

Re:Law of Decreasing Return With 90% Chance of Ran

[Reziac]

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.

why? nothing will read 'em

[Splork]

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.

Re:Law of Decreasing Return With 90% Chance of Ran

[shoemakc]

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

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

Not really.....

[mindstrm]

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?