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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."
one word : density. A DVD stores more information per square milimeter and thus has to rotate slower to pass the same amount of data under the laser.
kewl, no ?
When will I end this grieving ? When will my future begin ?
I think you mean 60MB/s (MegaBYTES per second, roughly ATA-66) and nor 60Mbps (MegaBITS per second, rougly 8MB/s, which is something like first-generation IDE drives).
178MBps would mean about 22MB/s, fast enough for any computer with as little as ATA-33 support.
Actually they did update the superdrive. It writes DVD-R at 4x and DVD-RW at 2x.
I used to try and helpfully correct people in hopes of preserving the original meaning, but I got sick of the blank stares.
Calling DVD "Digital Video Disc" kinda popped up when DVD-video was unleashed on the market. I'm pretty sure it was an unintentional change by the masses because they mostly only knew DVD as a video format (how many people even today have ever used an actual DVD-ROM?). But it was and is considered versatile because it can store not just video, but audio and data also. I couldn't find a useful link to back me up, but here's a link from CD-Info.
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.
A 5400 RPM drive cannot do 30MB/s sustained when the filesystem is fragmented and the system is doing just about anything else. IDE drives don't have n-way branched caches like SCSI drives do so they can't handle concurrent access like a SCSI drive can.
still writes at just 2x, but now the drive is "compatible with 4x dvdr media"
"Will this update enable my 2x SuperDrive to write at a higher speed?
This update enables you to read from and write to the new media, but it does not increase the speed of the drive. In fact, the updated 2x SuperDrive writes to this new media at 1x. So to obtain the highest performance from your 2x SuperDrive, we recommend that you continue using 2x DVD-R media just as you do today."
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!
It has to do with the specs for CDs and DVDs. The original audio CD standard required that about 150 KB be read from the disk each second. As drives became faster, they described their throughput as multiples of this base measure. With a DVD, which is primarily used for movies, the minimum throughput is much higher as video/audio information requires much more bandwidth than just audio. So the multiplier for DVDs represent a much larger chunk of data than that of a CD.
Even people that believe in pre-destiny look both ways before crossing the street.
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.
The transfer rate for a 1X CD-ROM is 150 Kbps. The transfer rate for a 1X DVD-ROM is 1108 Kbps, with the media only having to spin 3X faster due to higher data densities. You can find out more here.
A 16X DVD-ROM would spin at the same speed as a 48X CD-ROM and would transfer 21.13 MBps (megabytes per second). This would take about 3.7 minutes to fill a 4.7 GB disk.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
> 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.