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CD Burners with Built in Compression

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the now-isn't-that-fancy dept.

EconolineCrush writes "Bored of new CD-R/RW drives that only seem to decrease burn times by a few seconds over their predecessors? Check out this review of Plextor's PlexWriter Premium over at The Tech Report. With an advertised CD-R burn speed of 52X, the PlexWriter is certainly fast, but its ability to encrypt the contents of burned data CDs and squeeze nearly a Gigabyte of data onto a 700MB disc is what sets it apart from other high-speed burners."

4 of 248 comments (clear)

  1. Bending the standards by doormat · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The "compression" used here is actually bending the CD spec, as the pits on the disc are smaller than normal. As stated in the article, no other drives were able to read the disc that had just under 1GB stored on the disc. The setting at 120% of normal capacity seemed to work on a few more drives, but still not all. Its prolly just easier to get a DVD+/-RWfor $300 USD instead of going and buying all new CD-ROMs/CDRWs that read the compressed discs (assuming you have a few computers).

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  2. Re:Even zipped? by Danta · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Yes, because its a hardware "compression" technology, i.e. it doesn't modify the data it gets, just fits more of it on the disc: "The process works by shortening the length of the pits being written to the disc; shorter pits means more pits fit on the disc, and more pits means more data. The problem, of course, is that because these pits are shorter than the standard for data or audio CDs, compatibility with other drives may be hit or miss. Plextor does guarantee that the PlexWriter Premium will read any GigaRec disc, but they make no guarantees about other drives."

  3. Re:CD Burners with Built in Compression by arcanumas · · Score: 5, Insightful
    So if it does not interoperate with other devices it is not really a CD/RW breakthrough but rather an extension to the hell that has become CD-R. It may never be adopted by other firms and you are stuck with disks that become useless once your device breaks.
    And i have to agree with you that this is just putting CD-R techology to life-support. DVD is coming our way rapidly..

    What happened to those flueroscent 'something' technologies that promised tremendous capacities?

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  4. OR... by VirtuaKnight · · Score: 5, Insightful

    You could just spend a little extra money on a DVD-R or DVD-RW drive, and gain the ability to burn 4.7GB of data to a disk that uses an already popular format.