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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 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 ?
...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
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'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 ?
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?
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.
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!
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!
looks like i'm going to have to upgrade my Netflix subscription.
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.
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.
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.
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").
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.
Who do you think holds the camera?
funny munging
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.
...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...
--
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Maybe a 16X DVD-R drive will settle the war between DVD-R and DVD+R. One can only hope.
http://www.kubuntu.org/
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
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!