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."

Comments

Would you trust your data on these discs?

[yummysoup]

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)

They used to do it that way.

[SHEENmaster]

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.