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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 ?
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?
.. fine. I'll patent the laser that can ignite stuff. Maybe I can get it powerful enough to shoot people in the ass.
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ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
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.
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.
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.
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").
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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