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CD Burners with Built in Compression
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."
Price(street): US$107
Considering that you can get a DVD burner for under $200 now why would you want a CD/RW that burns disks that are unreadable(at 1:1.4 setting) in other drives?
Whenever the offence inspires less horror than the punishment, the rigour of penal law is obliged to give way...
The Tech Report also notes that the LiteOn LTR-52246S that they compared the Plextor to, costs over $50 less and is just as fast. So if you don't need the compressed CD's that don't work in most other drives. This is a good high end drive for bargain hunters. (They noted a price of $43).
Or for $50 more than the Plextor go and get a DVD-RW drive.
http://www.kubuntu.org/
It's not just this drive. Even things with the most basic interfaces like labelers and signs, even if they wrote their little gizmo interfaces in Java. Sure here you probably need a driver or an ioctl(), but it's not rocket science.
I'll buy the one w/ Linux/Unix/Mac support.
Linux and Windows both have compressed file systems that can be applied to CD rom.
Besides making the data disk readable from only one os I see no sereous draw backs to this software solution.
So this hardware solution is not OS dependent but it appears to have issues with reguards to other CD rom drives.
If someone wanted to they could put the Linux compression in a Windoes driver or add windows compression to Linux.
and Mac Os X support should be easy enough.
I don't actually exist.
CD-Rs degrade over time just like any other media. If you "compress" the data on it (i.e., use less of the media surface for each individual bit), it's more likely that a bit will become unreadable over time.
Suppose you're squeezing an extra 30% of data on the disc. I'd expect it's at least that much more likely that a scratch, excessive heat, time, or whatever would turn your backup into a coaster.
This is a bit different than the increase in HD platter density. With HDs, where the product includes both the rw mechanism and the media, the manufacturers had to implement stricter quality controls and test their media to tighter specs as they squeezed more data on the same amount of surface area. (And even still, reliability of IDE drives is poorer). In the case of these "compressed cds", the media is the same, and the manufacturers haven't tested its reliability when used with higher-density pits.
Maybe over time we'll see CD-R media that's been tested/certified for this standard (just like we now have media that's certified for various burn speeds). But until then I certainly wouldn't trust a compressed CD-R with any important data. (Or, I'd at least trust it far less than I do an uncompressed one)
I recently bought an rs232 plotter, a historic one, just because its manual had example source code for usage. The code was BASIC, but it was more than enough to get a plotter app written in Linux.
Before Bill Gates "0\/\/nz0r3d" a computer on every desktop in America, companies had to make stuff open. Before hard disks and resident operating systems were common, you had to release example code so that developers would make their software compatible with your hardware.
Now, many hardware manufacturers are only beginning to support alternative platforms again.
For the record, this thing's blatent violation of the CD-ROM standards would keep anyone with a brain from buying it. If these discs would work in all drives and the burner was worth the money, there would be Linux drivers within a few weeks.
For the company's sake, I hope they recoup their development costs. As for me, I have compatible cdroms, compressed ISO if I need it, and a tape drive whose capacity puts and disc to shame.
People won't sacrifice compatibility for a measly 44%. Well, I will with compressed ISO just because my backups will never be read outside a Linux system.
Did that article check the MD5 sums of the files? I suspect there was massive data corruption on the 3rd party drives.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
> 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 supports all other formats as well, is faster than many other CD writers and can also read copy protected music CDs. Plextor is back to its old heights in providing a quality product and moves all OEM stuff back into in the shadow.
They were the first who recognized that a black interior decreases the bit error rate. They also provide good support. They once sent me a new ROM for no price.
They also have DVD writers and the only reason why they do not support this variable pit length feature there is probably because they haven't ordered bigger flash ROMs yet.
Yes, the pit length can be set in such a way that 1.2 GB fits on a CD-R or you can change it to 900 MB and get a good chance that it can still be read by others CDROM drives.
They also sell the CD writer with analyses software, so you can check the quality of your burnings.
They don't leave you with much arguments to call them a bad company
In other words: they never cared much about what you call hell
Sven