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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."
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.
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.
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."
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.
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").