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16x DVD-R Drives Planned for 2004
madsenj37 writes "From this article at PC World: 'Mitsubishi Electric has developed a more powerful semiconductor laser that should pave the way for 16X DVD writers to be commercially available by about 2004. The new laser is able to deliver pulses of light at a power of 200 milliwatts, which is double that of lasers used in today's 4X DVD writer drives, the Tokyo company said this week.' It goes on to say that a whole Digital Versatile Disc Could be written in about 3.5 minutes."
mmmm - I want one! and Xmas has come & gone... DRAT!!!
"Bishops and Bookies live off the irrational hopes of mankind." Bertrand Russell
@ 20MB/s
I sincerely hope Apple picks up where it left off with the superdrive : they were the first to incorporate it, but they're still stuck at 2x speed...
I'm planning to buy a high end dual G4, but I'm waiting for Apple to up the specs on components (but NOT the CPU for a change) FSB, RAM, GPU... If I pay $5000 on a computer, I want the biggest, baddest machine available, and 8x or at least 4x DVD writing, 533MHZ FSB with Radeon 9700Pro should be default. Except for the BTO radeon, I'm have no other options but wait...
When will I end this grieving ? When will my future begin ?
Why the discrepency between CD-R and DVD-R drive speeds (i.e. 40x CD-R writes a 640mb disc in ~3.5 min whereas a 16x DVD-R would write a 4.7gb disc in ~3.5 minutes). Anyone?
fp?
...and develop a DVD substrate that won't ignite as lasers move to higher power and lower wavelength.
I hereby patent that idea.
But what do I know. I'm just looking for anonymous gay sex.
it will count as 4 4x burners...
What do you know I wrote a novel
Well, if DVD burning is anything like CD burning, then we can also expect the first DVD coasters in 2004...
Hate me!
At that speed drives will be capable of writing data at 176 megabits per second
Maybe things will change in a year, but my hardrive only reads at about 60 Mbps. That isn't even half the speed this drive is suposed to be able to write at. The only way I can see this working is if you have the memory to buffer 3GB before you start writing.
It was me, I did it, I moved your cheese
I'l take the bait... apparently you don't use the iMovie/iDVD combo ? I have a DVD writer, but haven't pirated movies ever, and don't plan to.
:-)
I do burn a dvd ocne a month with home movies of the kids, cats, and neighbour lady when she's showering
When will I end this grieving ? When will my future begin ?
So you admit to stealing your neighbour's intellectual property. Thief.
...signed, Jack Valenti
(I wouldn't mind getting a copy for ``audit purposes'' if you can spare one. Thanks.)
Would it be possible to have multiple lasers all burning at once to increase speed? Like dual lasers working on opposite sides of the disk.
Of course, the software logic required to keep the lasers out of each others layers could be complex, but it seems from an ignorant stance that you could immediately double write speed that way. Add three and would you triple?
Anyone that knows more than me have a word on this?
Wow ! They must each count as five DVD writers, 'cause they're real fast !
I thought they were Digital Video Discs.
Which are you talking about? Sustained or burst rate?
If Moores law applied to the strength of dvd lasers by 2009 users will be getting disintegrated like Jeff Bridges, especially if you were violating the EULA,
Where do you want to go in a puff of smoke today
Careful! Up that laser power too much and we'll be in material breach of the UN thingy on weapons of mass destruction...
They say the first thing to go is your penis. Well, it's either that or your brain. I forget which...
your hard drive reads at a LOT faster than 60mbit/sec (60Mbps = 7.5MBps = 7.5MByte/sec) unless your computer is about 6-7 years old.
My roommate's 18 month old laptop displays a progress meter when it comes out of hibernate that reads "n of 128 MB read". The n increased at a rough rate of 5 MB per second. Thus, that must be a normal rate for slow laptop hard drives, and when I saw "60 mbps", I assumed "laptop".
incidentally, my cheetah 15k.3 drive
Is available only for big bulky desktop computers because it draws so much power.
Will I retire or break 10K?
...people trying to burn 2.4x media at 4x.
Its near impossible to find 4x DVD-R media these days.
I work for a software duplication & fulfilment firm, and we started doing in-house DVD-R duplication this year, alongside our existing CD-R duplicators. Waiting for the machine to burn the DVD-R discs, it feels like we've stepped back in time about 10 years, to when the first CD-R recorders came out (we still have our original Philips CDD-521 box in a cupboard somewhere, bought when writers cost several grand and discs cost 20 quid a pop!) Anything that makes for faster DVD writing would be a good thing indeed!
-MT.
If this is on one DVD, either you're divorced and the kids only come over weekends or you must have one hell of an understanding wife!
In Soviet Russia, the 16X DVD-R writer's 200 milliwatt laser burns YOU.
I don't have the specs on my 1-year-old machine, but a quick test turned up a transfer rate of about 140mpbs transfer off my IDE hard drive while the CD-ROM was busy reading a CD on the second IDE channel. That's well short of the 176mpbs claimed for the 16x burners, suggesting the market for these devices may be smaller than anticipated for the first few years, keeping their price higher.
Hopefully SATA will be fast enough to compensate and widely available in time to make this product marketable.
What do you mean they cut the power? How can they cut the power, man? They're animals!
The article never managed to mentioned that it is only 1/4th in size. After all it is the equivalency of 4 normal DVD writers and yet the same size. Talk about size efficienzy!
... The MPAA/RIAA &c. start a DMCA-based lawsuit against the DVD-R drive manufacturers.
;)
While they're at it, they might as well sue the makers of Sharpie markers for trafficking in merchandise that can be used to circumvent most CD copy protection.
They should also sue my aunt, she manufactured a 6-year old son who can decode the ROT-13 encryption on e-books.
Repeal the DMCA!
looks like i'm going to have to upgrade my Netflix subscription.
Yesterday MPAA agents raided Mitsubishi Labs and "confiscated" the equivalant of 1600 DVD burners at gunpoint.
The MPAA issued a press release, claiming "We must do whatever it takes to stop these pirates. If that means sidestepping the tradiotional forms of law enforcement when they have failed us, then so be it."
Likewise Mitsubishi issued a press release: "Yesterday our lab was broken into by two hoodlums in black clothing, who stole 100 of our prototype 16x dvd players."
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
It goes on to say that a whole Digital Versatile Disc Could be written in about 3.5 minutes.
Boy it's time for an upgrade!!!
Reason 1)
Let's see, 3.5 minutes = 210 seconds
If a DVD with dual layer is used, than 9 gigs in 210 seconds means 44megs/second. My HD doesn't do near that!!
Reason 2)
I burn a whole CD in 9 minutes (8x CD burner)!!! This thing will burn a whole DVD in less then half the time it takes me to make a CD!!!
It's definitely time for an upgrade...
I know the Truespeed CD readers operated on the same basis, only they had 7 reading heads, not writing. I suppose you could do the same with writing heads, but I guess they would be a lot harder to align properly, with much less tolerances. Besides, I don't really think there's that big a marked, if you can't do it within a reasonable time with 16x burning you'll likely to for pressed DVDs anyway. That's why the truespeed drives failed really, if you needed that fast a CD, why not have it on hdd instead...
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
That's like a 160x CD burner. DVD transfer rate ~ 10x CD transfer rate. There's one problem...most CD and DVD driver are still on the 33 MB ATA interface. A 16x DVD burner pushes the limit on that. Most 16x DVD-ROM drives never transfer anywhere near 16x.
If it takes a normal DVD player ~2 hours to play a 4.7 gb disk (single sided, single layer), then it should take 120/16 = 7.5 minutes to burn it at 16x!! Where did you get 3.5 minutes from?
Paul
So all that money Reagan sunk into the Strategic Defense Initiative is finally going to pay off!
Will these be in some form of SCSI since IDE would probalby not hold up for this unless you had a very large buffer. Apple uses SCSI for almost everything now, maybe it is time we see SCSI in PCs more often now.
I thought that it was initially considered for entertainment purposes only by the video industry but the r&d/tech folks involved always considered it a multi-purpose data medium. *sigh* My life has been a sham. Well, there's always the next one. Thanks for the info. Trying to find further evidence led me to these two sites for anyone interested....
h tml (this one's actually interesting)
http://www.nswc.navy.mil/cosip/nov97/cots1197-1.s
http://wombat.doc.ic.ac.uk/foldoc/foldoc.cgi?DVD
Who do you think holds the camera?
funny munging
> Would it be possible to have multiple lasers all burning at once to increase speed?
You may remember Zen Research who created the TrueX technology found in the old Kenwood 72x drives. I believe these used 7 heads for reading data. However, the technology seems to have died, along with the company. I remember reading reports of the drives not being 100% compatible, having speed issues, and having high failure rates.
When DVDs were first coming out, all the talk was about the fact that you could write two layers on each side, thus getting rediculous amounts of data on them. Are there double-sided DVD-R discs? Are there burners that can do double layers?
I'd moderate you up if I could. Although I wouldn't quite rule it out, the technical difficulty is very high due to the necessity of an unbroken sequence of bits.
It's getting annoying that the DAT drive costs more than the rest of the computer.
First was they were dependent on the spiral pitch being relatively constant so they could hit 7 tracks at once. Well, they were constant until 80 minute CDs came out.
Second is that the tracks on CD-Rs aren't completely parallel. CD-R tracks have a slight wobble to them to allow the writer to determine the rotation rate of the disk (and thus how far they are along) while writing. The wobble is a fixed frequency, and thus as the track lengths change from inside to outside, the wobble does not nest up nicely between tracks like Pringles chips. So, all of a sudden, tracking one track didn't keep the other 6 readers on line.
Finally, they got killed by copy protected CDs. Copy protected CDs purposely have bad sections to them. With most CD drives you read up until you get to the bad spot and then the drive freaks. On a Zen, the drive would freak 6 rotations early. This made it incompatible with copy protections and slowed the read speeds in the protected area.
To be honest, the technology, while neat, had a fatal flaw from the start. On a single head drive, when the disk rotates around once the head is advanced to new data on the next spiral. On the Zen, the head is ONLY advanced one spiral. Thus, 6 of the heads are reading the same spiral that the head next to them read last time around and only one head is reading new data. Thus, you have to get off the spiral, move the head, and then servo lock to the spiral again. And once of the slowest things a CD-drive can do is servo lock to the spiral. This is why seek times are in the 50ms range (used to be 150ms!). So you get data at 7X speed, then have to pick up and move to another spot for 1/20th second, then get data at 7X again. It's no wonder the drives rarely produced the speeds they spoke of.
That'll be good timing, it'll take that long before consumers figure out which standard will be the safe one to buy.
DVD disks support two sides and two layers, so defacto quadropling the capacity of a single layered, single sided disk.
DVD-R unfortunatly only supports one layer. Although I have seen double sided DVD-R disks, but those require flipping them upside down to access the other half of the data.
Most DVD-Video disks use two layers on one side to increase the capacity above 4.3GB. This means that to copy most DVD-Video disks, it is neccessary to reencode the video at a lower bitrate, or remove some extras.
I would also be looking forward to a release of a dual layer DVD-R disk, but I assume itll be very difficult to acheive with current technology (at least unless its to cost thousands).
... but im not that optimistic until I actually see it.
Its all too often companys announce they are working on something revolutionary, and the only outcome is raised stocks for them, and no final product.
Four years ago we had IBM claiming cheaply available 6 Terrabyte solid state hard disks the size of a sugar cube will be availible in 2000...
...when someone releases a standalone portable burner using this technology. One'll just head down to the video store and burn DVDs as one pretends to browse for a rental. A half-hour later, you've got fifteen pirate movies...
--
Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
Maybe a 16X DVD-R drive will settle the war between DVD-R and DVD+R. One can only hope.
http://www.kubuntu.org/
I know that you can permanatly damage your eyes with a lazer from a CD burner, but with it reading, it is only temporary. I know someone who did it, and they see a scratch everywhere they look. They might have been lieing, but I thought it was interesting. Think the 16x DVD-R would make you blind maybe?
Now i can burn my pr0n...err i mean my Warez...err i mean i back ups even quicker...!
All the 8 fastest 7200rpm drives:
...have minimum transfer rates far higher than 16x1,108 = 17,7 megabyte/s. If they're on separate channels, you should be fine with a good old non-serial ATA disk...
Western Digital Caviar WD2000BB (200 GB ATA-100) - 33.1
Western Digital Caviar WD2000JB (200 GB ATA-100) - 32.8
Western Digital Caviar WD1200JB (120 GB ATA-100) - 29.2
Western Digital Caviar WD1200BB (120 GB ATA-100) - 29.1
Samsung SpinPoint P40 (80 GB ATA-100) - 26.0
Maxtor DiamondMax Plus D740X (80 GB ATA-133) - 25.4
IBM Deskstar 120GXP (120 GB ATA-100) - 25.0
Seagate Barracuda ATA V (120 GB ATA-100) - 24.7
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
The pioneer rep I talk to recently basically said that double-sided DVD-Rs were used mainly in automated DVD jukeboxes. Because of handling issues (fingerprints, scratches, dust), most people with home burners don't use them - by the time you finished burning the first side, chances are you'd have ruined part of the second side. Either that, or after you finished the dual sided burn, at some point in the future, you'd ruin the side facing the top. In a jukebox, it doesn't matter since it's a controlled environment.
We don't need a faster DVD recorder. What we need is someone to make sense out of all of the umpteen gazillion different DVD recordable formats--DVD-RAM, DVD+R, DVD-RW, DVD÷WR, DVD+-R, DVD\W, DVD*ROM, etc. etc. and make it clear WHICH of the silly things can actually be played reliably on the current installed base of DVD players.
Incidentally, how the heck is anything but a specialty store going to be able to STOCK all of those six or eight kinds of recordable media--in any kind of reasonable choice of manufacture, or packaging? (Do YOU know off the top of your head which of the formats are available as 2-side? As 2-layered? As 2-sided, 2-layered?)
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
A Beowulf Cluster of These!!!
i just want a burner that can do dual layer discs, so i can back up a full basic install of my system to 1 disc for a restore
What's the damn point of talking about CD/DVD reading/writing speed using those damn "multipliers" 4X, 8X, 128X.. 16 * WHAT?! Just why isn't the actual writing speed in kilo/mega bytes used?!
Alan Cox wrote: :-).
>> On any procmail new enough not to be full of security holes you set
>Brain on, Imeant majordomo of course 8)
You got me worried there for a brief (very brief) moment
-- Stephen R. van den Berg (AKA BuGless)
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