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."

Comments

PowerMac schedule ?

[selderrr]

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...

Re:PowerMac schedule ?

[sporty]

I hope you do realize that the 533mhz FSB that intel is claiming is really a 133mhz bus that is quad-pumped (similar to agp which is 66mhz, double- quad- or 8way-pumped to give higher bandwidth but worse latency). This is not the optimal solution, and is certainly a far cry from a true 533mhz fsb.

Is that so? Paralellism and efficiency depends on the application in use. If the bus, with one line, can always be ready to carry the next instruction without blocking the prior one, then sure, it's a great solution.

If there is any reason for hesitation of the bus, then instructions will queue. It is just like SMP processors. It's not always guarnateed that any processor will be given it's full capacity to process. Is why SMP works out a little better as it handles extra instructions.

Optimal solution, no, but a "true 533 bus" might have latency problems if the queue gets full.

too fast?

[mobets]

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.

Re:16 speed?

[MindStalker]

Na, my first DVD coaster was a few months ago with my first DVD writer. Ordered a pack of generic DVD-Rs half ended up being coasters, now I just buy opertron (cheapest non generic and recommended by pioneer).
Ask Slashdot: What DVD-R DVD-RW media brands do you recommend?

SCSI?

[xombo]

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.

Looking at storagereview.com...

[Kjella]

All the 8 fastest 7200rpm drives:
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

...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...

Kjella

Which flavor was that, again?

[dpbsmith]

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?)