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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."
Not only can we be pirates, but now we can be terrorists, all in one easy cd-burning step.
The Plextor's GigaRec feature uses shorter pit lengths to squeeze more data onto a disc. I guess in a way it is indeed a literal kind of compression. Still, the topic title seems somewhat misleading considering that the usual kind of compression people talk is about is something quite different.
A nice feature certainly, but of limited use. Those discs can only be read in that drive (and 1 or 2 older Plextor models). With current DVD-writer pricing who is gonna settle for a CD writer no matter how premium it is?
Umm, why bother? Nothing reads these overburned discs when they are done...
To test compatibility, I burned four discs: Two data discs and two audio discs, with one of each at the 120% setting and one of each at the 140% setting. I then tried these discs in just about any player I could find. For data discs, that meant copying all the files off the disc onto the hard drive to make sure they could all be read. For audio discs, that meant making sure every track on the disc played properly.
The data discs were somewhat disappointing; out of seven optical drives tested, only two could successfully copy the files from the 120% disc, and none of the drives could copy from the 140% disc. Some drives couldn't even get a directory off the discs, while others failed part of the way through the file copy test. There was no rhyme or reason to the successes versus the failures, either; the two drives that "won" the test were a BTC 48X burner and a Hitachi DVD-ROM drive. The failures included a DVD/CD-RW combo drive, a Pioneer DVD-RW drive, a Sony DRU-500A DVD+/-RW recorder, and the LiteOn burner used in the benchmarks.
The audio discs were both more successful and more surprising. I tried these in three different computer drives, a bookshelf stereo system, a component DVD player, and two car stereos (one OEM Nissan, one my venerable Aiwa CDC-MP3). One of the computer drives recognized both discs, and did OK until near the end of them (failing to play the last two tracks on the 120% disc, and the last four tracks on the 140% disc). Another computer drive wouldn't play them at all, and a third played the entire 120% disc but couldn't play the 140% disc at all.
The bookshelf system and the component DVD player achieved identical results: Both played the 120% disc without any issues, but wouldn't even recognize the 140% disc. Perhaps the most surprising of all was the car CD players; both of them played every track on both discs. I was surprised enough that the wunderkind CDC-MP3 pulled this off, but an OEM Nissan player? Crazy.
He says "Crazy", I say "Duh."
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).
The Doormat
If you're not outraged, then you're not paying attention.
"Compression" is a misnomer in this case. The drive fits more data on the disc by making the pits smaller, thus allowing more of them to fit on the disc. Whether the source data is already compressed is irrelevant.
"People that quote themselves in their signatures bother me" - athakur999
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."
And yes, yet another feature is on-the-fly encryption. Note that the article states that you need Plextor software to decrypt, which is a nice vendor lockin for them, I guess.
I just have a suspision that I will be able to decrypt them in Linux about when Satan is building snowmen...what's wrong with encrypting then burning?
"To any truly impartial person, it would be obvious that I am right."
Just not at the same time.
GigaRec
The other special feature is GigaRec, which enables the PlexWriter to squeeze up to 40% more data than normal onto a piece of media. 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.
So basically this will never catch on. The standard CD format is waaay to entrenched to be replaced. Other than for backup purposes, why would you want to burn a disc that's almost guaranteed not to work on another CD-ROM? The last thing need is another incompatible format of disc to worry about.. (DVD+RW, DVD-RW, DVD-RAM, etc)
SecuRec
Now that we've evaluated the drives' performance, let's take a look at a couple of the features that make the PlexWriter Premium so special. The first of these is SecuRec, which encrypts data before it is written onto the CD. You specify a password before beginning the write process, and once the CD is written, you need that password in order to view the recorded data. If the password is ever lost, so is the data.
There are a couple of limitations with the SecuRec feature. First, discs need to be recorded in DAO (disc-at-once) mode, so you can't burn multiple sessions of encrypted data, and as you might expect, only data CDs (not audio CDs) are supported. Second, in order to view the data, you need a copy of Plextor's SecuViewer software. This isn't that big a deal for Windows users, as the program is freely downloadable from the Plextor website. Linux and/or Mac users, however, are out of luck as far as I know, as SecuViewer isn't available for operating systems other than Windows. Just so there's no confusion, I'll point out that while you need a PlexWriter Premium drive to create a SecuRec disc, any CD-ROM drive can read one with the SecuViewer software and the proper password.
How this is better than a secure install program has got me... There's no real innovation here except that the encryption is moved to the CD Burning software. There are already quite a few tools to build installers that encrypt the installers and prompt for password to extract/install.
Basically it's just encrypting and then zipping except using a proprietary system....
I love Plextor too, but their DVD burners are kind of disappointing when compared to the Plex CD burners. They use the so-so NEC drives with a slightly modified firmware, and currently only support DVD+R/RW. I think Sony is much more innovative in the DVD burner arena, especially with their new external 4x DVD-R/RW, DVD+R/RW, combo firewire/USB 2.0 drive.
Proprietary compression. Proprietary "encryption"? (They don't say enough to make a determination.)
I would typically use those features to archive sensitive information. And the when the drive breaks, or they stop supporting it, I'm hosed.
Thanks, but no thanks. I'll stick with standard compression/encryption tools.
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...
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.
Method 1:
mkisofs -z
From the manpage:
-z(Should not be too hard to port the transparent decompression code to *BSD and Darwin...)
Method 2:
KNOPPIX uses transparent decompression through a loop device to store more than 2 GBytes on a simple CDROM.
Just my two cents.
Denken hilft.
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.
Just how many CD-ROM burners does this one count for?
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
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.
"squeeze nearly a Gigabyte of data onto a 700MB disc"
RIAA are gonna love this... "We found 5,000 burners - well actually we only found one, but it had 52x, compression and everything!"
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)
Most of the posts I've seen claim that this new feature is useless, because the non-standard disks won't read on other drives.
But what if manufacturers decided to jump on the bandwagon, and start supporting these "overcooked" CDs. If other drives started coming out, claiming the ability to read anything below 300% or 500%[*], you've got a new contender to DVD-RW as a backup medium.
We've dealt with backwards compatability issues before--remember when CD-RW came out? People will accept that, to read a 140% disk, they need a 140% or better reader, and life will go on. The problem is, if the specs are kept proprietary, I doubt any demand will be there for this technology.
It may come to nothing, like back when somebody found a way to cram 30 megs of data on an ordinary floppy. But I think the market fragmentation would be worth it if something like this took off.
* Assuming, of course, such a feat is even possible.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
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.
This is news? HD-Burn has been around for a little while now. It basically doubles CD-R capacity to 1.4 GB by shortening the pit length and using more efficient error correction. Oh, and it works in most CD-ROM drives that are out already.
This message brought to you by the Council of People Who Are Sick of Seeing More People.
For years now a certain company has been delivering data to the company I work for on CD-R's. And every time, it's a crapshoot finding a drive that can read the thing. Sometimes I can, but my colleague in the next cube can't. Sometimes it's the other way around. Sometimes I can read it in my Mac but not in my PC. Sometimes in my PC but not in my Mac.
This seems to be par for the course. And it's even worse with CD-RW's. And worse yet with DVD media.
Yes, I've heard all the usual folklore. "If you have a reasonably MODERN drive, it SHOULD read MOST CD media--if it's of high quality."
And how can you tell if the blanks are good enough? With gasoline, I glance at the octane number printed on the pump; with motor oil, the API rating.
With CD-R media? Well, some folks say "just use Verbatim," some say "use anything BUT Verbatim," some say "the green dye is best," some say "I just buy the cheapest I can find and never have any problems..." Some say "Just keep testing different brands and stick with the one you find that works best." Right. I have better things to do with my time than QA media.
And if you have problems and complain, the media companies say "sounds like your drive is the problem" and the drive companies say "sounds like you have bad media."
Meanwhile, this company keeps sending us CD's and when one comes in, it's time to spend an hour finding who has a PC that will read THIS one.
We've asked the company to please use high quality media and they assure us that they do.
The LAST, absolutely the LAST thing we need is some harebrained nonstandard compression scheme, and idiots sending us compressed CD's and telling us, "Well, they work fine in MY drive."
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
I don't see why some of you are so adamant about this technology being "useless". The most popular argument seems to be that one should just buy a dvd burner instead of cramming more data on a CD-R.
The last time I checked, it's still over $0.50 per DVD disc (including rebates), while I obtain almost all my CD-R's for free. Right now, I have 300+ blank CD-R's sitting around that I won't use anytime soon, all compliments of Staples/Office Max/Circuit City. I'd rather use that extra couple hundred meg per CD than spend more money on new blank disks. (Plus, for a GOOD DVD burner, it's still in the $200 range)
Don't know about you, but most of the data I back up is for MY computer, so I don't give a damn if nobody else can read it. Worst case, I'll copy the data to my HD, then send it over the network to the other comp.
And for the record I'm delighted at the fact that a company is focusing on other potential improvements to their CD-RW drives than being able to burn a disc a couple of seconds faster than their previous models. Right now, I only have a 16X burner, and most of the time, it's plenty fast for me.