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DVD Burner Round-up
Julio writes "Gone are the days of storage floppies and zip drives... CD-RW drives do an excellent job in making cheap backups and just about every new computer is equipped with one. As computers and software evolve, so will media. DVD burner drives are already optional equipment on many computers, and will probably become a standard within the next year. Are you ready for a DVD burner? TechSpot has posted a round-up of flagship DVD recorders from Plextor, Panasonic and Pioneer."
For $150, it was a total bargain. Supposedly, +R is going to be the "standard"...
-- not until all the standards crap settles down and I know what I get wont be useless 2 months later.
I don't even waste a lot of timing reading up on them. Just waiting on the market to decide what will be dominant.
.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
Well, 1 out of 2 isn't bad.
The real reason zips are going away is the key-chain size USB storage device. Why carry around a 100meg disc and have to have a drive installed on both ends (or have to carry the drive itself around) when you can simply stick this pen-sized piece of plastic into the back of a USB port (one of the reasons new models have additional USB ports up front), and boom!, instant 32-256 meg filesystems.
The only significant delay was Windows 98 first edition and Win95, neither of which supported filesystems on USB devices. 98SE and beyond did, so once the majority of windows boxes moved on to 2K and XP, there was nothing stopping them.
"But remember, most lynch mobs aren't this nice." (H.Simpson)
-- Joe
And the winner is ..... the Plextor
I know, i know, everyone is shocked and amazed.
"I can not bring myself to believe that if knowledge presents danger, the solution is ignorance" - Isaac Asimov
Once they start becoming more standardized, looks like we might have to start worrying about the MPAA as much as the RIAA. And for $150,000 a song, who knows how much they'll try to fine for having a movie on your HD.
It's interesting to have that much backup space avail for a non-server computer. I got a Powerbook last December with the Super-drive and the only thing I can find to use it for is mostly cd-r. Dvd-r is nice to have, but I don't have much use for it. Maybe someone who d/l's movies or something can do it, but...
Otoh, for making movies and stuff, this is very useful via the whole iMovie (or PC equiv) thing. But where this would really come in handy is on a server of some sort where you have big amounts of data. But even then, you need to back up more than 4 or 5 gigs worth usually, so..
But for the end user, I guess it's nicer to have more than less. Who knows, I might start needing to back up more than 665MB soon..
I'm already favoring the Plextor above all others without even reading the article or doing my own comparisons.
The reason for this?
My Plextor CD/RW.
The lesson is this: If you build quality and get people to trust your brand name (based on prior experience), then the 2nd sale is *much* easier.
C|N>K
A while back I needed a large capacity backup device, and I had to choose between CD burners, Zip drives, Jaz drives, and those old optical disks. At the time, because of hardware and media cost, it would have been a tough decision, but by waiting, CD burners came to the forefront and were the most economical choice.
Where does this tie in to DVD burners? Well, they are a bit expensive (although coming down) and I want to wait to see if a better technology is just over the horizon.
There you go, my two cents, more or less.
Karma: Can there be a void?
.. -. - . .-. .-. --- -...
I just bought a Pioneer A06 yesterday. It does both DVD-R/W and DVD+R/W
They don't cover Pioneer's newly released DVR-A06 (multi-format) or any of Sony's nice burners.
It would've been nice to see the results of playing these burnt dvd's on dvd-systems... I for one am interested in drives that allow me to burn dvd-movies and watch them on my big screen tv using my dvd player...
That's all thats gets me.. The best DVD burner out there is the Sony DVD+-RW 4x..
I'm trying to talk the Promotions guy into giving these away with our logo on them. I figure that the 64 Meg ones can't be that expensive in bulk.
I could settle this would standards mess with $200. As soon as I buy a -R drive +R would become the standard, and if I bought a +R drive -R would become the standard. My refusal to buy a DVD writer is the only thing keeping the industry from standardizing.
Slashdotter are stupid and biased.
There's more than 3 manufacturers, people. But even with that, was it a shock at all that Plextor won? I mean, come on, it's Plextor for Christ's sake.
... using DVDs as coasters for the beer cans!
Even better than the pen-sized piece of plastic is this sweet watch
Yeah- zip drives are pretty pointless as far as I can tell.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
I keep almost buying a DVD burner but I just can't bring myself to do so. With a CD burner it was a large step up in storage space compared to the standard floppy, and was easily read anywhere as almost everyone had a CD-ROM (as apposed to other solutions such as zip, jazz, etc).
DVD burners on the other hand don't quite seem to offer enough for me to justify buying one. My files are hardly over 700 megs, the media is still quite expensive, it's useless already for hard drive backups and I can't back up my own movies with it anyway (if they are double sided I suppose).
No doubt they will become standard some day as CD-RW's are these days. The drives and media will just become so cheap that they might as well include them.
Of just 3?
Is this guy really Anand in disguise?
I'm not sure how to say this without sounding like some Mac freak (which I am now :), but I've been doing DVD burning for years now.
:). The network and firewire is just faster. Plain and simple.
You've seen the chart (read the story), right? Yeah -- slow as heck it seems sometimes. The first time I really started using the burner it was on the Mac. Slow enough that I also got a Firewire card for one of the office PC's and confirmed it was, well, SLOW. 99% of my data is sitting on RAID-1 or 5 subsystems and backed up daily (thankfully
For corporate backups the data flows from hard drive to hard drive. Sits on RAID-5 servers going to a portable drive where it is dumped onto RAID-1 subsystems in multiple locations.
DVD is good for archiving movies/home videos in native format (so any DVD player can view them). Decent quality will give you 2 hours per DVD. Many more if you do something like I do and put them in MP4 format (~3 movies per DVD then).
A roaming laptop is great for a quick plug in to watch a archived movie as such. Otherwise any DVD player is good. The problem is it's only 4.7G worth which can easily be eaten up when users have 60-80G hard drives.
1-2G hard drives were the norm once CD-RW became the "norm" and you could do a lot of damage with 600 or 700M CD's. DVD's are barely usable (today) for backup needs and the speed still stinks for all flavors (+/-RW or RAM).
BLUE LASER with +20G is worth waiting a bit longer for, IMHO. That's large enough to be useful for movies (easily) and backing up data in chunks as needed. SPEED will be key or else it'll take too damn long. 4x at a minimum to start.
With blue laser coming along, what, next year (somewhat mainstream realistically)? I'm thinking the industry waited too long and bickered among themselves for too long (+, - or RAM) that the listed technology will be surpassed and old hat. It is for me at least...
DVD burners standard within the next year? That sounds a little too auspicious to me.
The usefulness for backing up information is obvious, but is there any real software that allows you to make copies DVDs and maintain the quality? (I'm just asking out of curiosity... not for any illegal reasons)
This is left as an exercise for the reader.
With all the +,-, RW, etc, how do I know which DVD drives I can use under Linux to read and write filesystems? Is there a FAQ on this somewhere?
I am not asking about decss, as that is easy to find on the web.
It delays the mass adoption of the product and
delays the commodity like low pricing.
Stupid, stupid, manufacturers
I gave up using tape for backups because it was too costly and time-consuming. For my audio engineering work, DVD-R is fantastic. I recently did a project that archived neatly onto 6 DVDs. That cost me a grand total of $20 for media and about the same amount of time to archive as did my Ecrix VXA1. However, the archives are infinitely more accessible, as I can open the disc on any machine with a DVD-ROM, regardless of having a VXA drive around. And, the files are instantly accessible, without having to restore from tape.
DVD-RW is fantastic!
Jory
Please don't buy a combo drive! Then someone would come out with a new format that would become the standard and we would all be screwed.
For anybody that needs fine control
over their CDROMs and DVDs, this guy
(Jorg Schilling) is a genius. His CDRecord
utilities are the best and the homepage is
here
Cdrecord supports DVD-R and DVD-RW with all known DVD-writers on all UNIX-like OS and on Win32.
DVD writing support is implemented in cdrecord since march 1998. Cdrecord writes DVD media similar to CD media.
Getting the stuff to work on IDE drives is
a bit tricky. But a lot of patience can
reap great results.
Murphy's law says that as soon as I buy one standard compliant model the entire market will shift to the other.
Given the current standards mix I have to disagree with the article's claim that DVD's will become a standard within a year's time. None of the profiled drives offer totally compatibility with the competing +/- R and RW standards. There are several drives from other manufacturers that support all four formats for about the same price though.
but what do this have to do with DVD burners? I don't see how this offtopic post is top rated.
this guy.
I have the Sony DRU510A, and I LOVE IT!
I would recommend this drive.
"Thoughts are more powerful than any weapon, and I don't even let my people own guns." --Joseph Stalin
I don't know about you, but I have encountered thousands more CDRs than I have ever seen USB keychain drives in use, *especially* considering that win9x can't support them very well.
CDBurners were very much the end for ZIP drives. By the time they became mainstream most computers around had a CDrom drive, the same cannot be said for USB filesystem support
If you can't see the value in jet powered ants you should turn in your nerd card. - Dunbal (464142)
Not only that, but the prices are coming down quickly, and the capacities are increasing almost as fast--you can get 2GB keychains now.
USB keychain drives are in that silly pricing phase right now where you can pay more for a 32MB model than a 128MB model if you're not careful (the local Walmart had a 128MB model last week for $40.00). High-capacity IDE hard drives went through the same thing.
I think keychain USB drives are going to be a real sleeper hit.
I stopped reading. Am I in the market to buy? Yes. Did you help me choose? Yes. You saved me the time and effort of reading your column.
Yo Grark
Canadian Bred with American Buttering.
Canadian Bred with American Buttering
I have the sony drive that does all the + and - R/RW I found + do not work in a lot of DVD drives I have tried and my minus I have yet to have fail.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
With the new high capacity disks/readers coming out I don't see much of a point buying these now.
Why get a dvd that holds a piddly 5gb when you can get 20gb capacity, hopefully these new discs/drives will come down in price soon.
...is being actively encouraged by the MPAA. More confusion in the marketplace leads to fewer people buying DVD burners, which results in higher prices, which leads to fewer DVD burners...
They figure that they can hold off piracy a bit.
if you're talking about burning stuff up, shocked and awed would have been more appropriate.
Still beta, though.
United States of America, good ol' backers of world peace.
Sony, TDK, and Iomega all have drives that can do DVD-R, DVD+R, DVD-RW, DVD+RW, DVD-RAM (in Iomega's case) at 4x or so. Why were none of these reviewed?
For more information, click here.
The only reason I would purchase a DVD Burner is to store movies recorded on my digital camcorder. I think that's the best use IMHO right now seeing as unedited and non-divx formats can be much larger.
Backing up my collection of Columbia, Atlantic, as well as, the other record companies entire catalogs is also of great use. I intend to over throw all major labels with my major uploads of their entire catalogs. It should only take me 1200 years to finish the uploads in progress on my 14.4k modem.
Seriously as soon as the dvd burners are in every household the MPAA will start to become heavy handed in it's approach just like the RIAA is now. Personally divx/mpeg screeners, cams, etc are alright but the quality is not dvd quality plus to decode, burn them and such it's just easier to buy the dvd.
I will say if the MPAA starts to use RIAA tactics then I'm done with buying dvds. I've already cut back as they are a some what silent partner in the current RIAA struggle against humanity but if they take it any further they're done. I see them as a lesser evil in a sense. The old bastard Jack Valentini or whatever his name is has no clue and he's a typical grandpa who doesn't know jack shit, much less, how to use a tv remote.
You aren't free to do anything, until you've lost everything.
but this review was lame: first of all it's reviewing the Pioneer A05 when the A06 has been available for quite a while (bought one last week, actually) and secondly it does seem quite short on content.
Things that should have been there if this was a decent review:
- speed/performance tests with DVD-RW/DVD+RW media (both, for drives that support both like the A06)
- compatibility tests with DVD+R/DVD-R media (aka burn in one burner, check that it's readable in the others)
- speed tests with CDR/CDRW media
- linux compatibility test (optional, but mentioning xcdroast/prodvd for burning data DVDs and the chain needed to encode video DVDs would've been nice)
- more drives! (LG, LiteOn, Sony + various off-brand ones)
etc. etc. etc.
-- the cake is a lie
Did anyone else glance at the title and think the MPAA is hunting down and destroying all DVD burners? If sharing an mp3 will soon get you 5 years in prison, they'd probably try to give you three or four simultaneous death sentences for copying a DVD... good thing I RTFA, I can sleep better now.
1. "Roundup", hardly. Three drives does not a roundup make :(
2. "Expensive". The difference in price from highest to lowest is $45, not too shabby and hardly worth the difference once you take in other considerations (like how many toasters cheap drive a produces). I have fond memories of creating shelves of cd toasters on our $3000 Ricoh 2x CDR when the cd blanks were $25 a piece on this one project. Ouch, thank god we weren't paying for those things, I bet we wen't through over $10K worth of blanks.
3. No checking of valid DVD video. He mentions people wanting to backup their DVD's, but then never tests to make sure any DVD backups actually play in most dvd players. I know for me this is critically important and I would want to see the results of such a test.
Great, now instead of those nice 710MB Divx files, I'll be downloading 4.71GB 'Full Qualify' DIVX's off Kazaa.
At least I will finally get that collection of 710MB Divx's off my to-burn partition.
Im dreaming ofa big bndwdth, That can resist the
I think keychain USB drives are going to be a real sleeper hit.
I would consider one as soon as most of the BIOS makers allow us to boot off of them.
Viv
Gmail invites for ip
What's the difference between DVD-R, DVD+R, and DVD-RAM?
Is there even a point to making disc RW and burners that can do RW? From my experience with CDs, RW are slower to burn, more expensive, and not as compatible. With CDRs costing less than what floppies used to sell for, RW capabilities are pointless. Just pop a new disc in instead. I can see DVDs going the same route as it matures. So why bother wasting the money for RW.
EvilCON - Made Famous by
Gone are the days of storage floppies and zip drives
No, not really - if you're working on something like docs back and forth between computers you use either floppies/zip or a network connection. The files' small sizes and constant updates makes burning ridiculous.
John Kerry is a Joke!
In the UK a multiformat reader (a pioneer 106) is now the same price as a -R/RW only (a pioneer 105).
Last month a 105 was £200+. Two weeks later the 106 was £200 and the 105 was £100. Now the 106 is £100. (Ish, £130 inc vat - under $200 US.) Media is down to 50p a disk for -R.
For the people bitching about speed, the 106 is a 4x writer (except for DVD-R/RW) which is around 6 _megabits_/second - 4.5gb every 15 mins. You can burn off a 50gb backup in 2.5 hrs!
But in the end, it matters little what you buy, as all new players will be able to read both. It's not like VHS vs Beta, where the things were different sizes, if consolidation happens it will be because of pressure on media prices (2x DVD-RW is cheaper to manufacture than 1x DVD-R and 1x DVD+R) and not because of anything else. After all, do you know anyone who uses CDRWs reguarly? Nope, me either, so the problems with not being able to exchange DVDRW disks will be minimal - and go away entirley as most people will get dual format drives anyway.
Beep beep.
" As soon as I buy a -R drive +R would become the standard, and if I bought a +R drive -R would become the standard."
Great, he bought a combo drive. We all need to switch to DVD-RAM now.
Anyone out there know how much CPU overhead these DVD Burners use? I've seen CD Burners run underspeed on about a PIII 400 and will max out a PIII 600. Could I put two DVD Burners in a single box? If so, what kind of CPU do you think I'd need to do simultaneous burning?
closed minded is as closed minded does
Mmm, yes, but for CD-RWs to become succesful floppy replacements we'd need several more things, like cd-rewriters on every computer. I don't know about other colleges, butI don't think they're going to give each PC at mine a cd-rewriter just so we can throw around files. Even besides that, CD-RWs are useful things, though they take ages to format once you get one chocked on stuff. Also, you're unable to edit files on CD, you'd have to copy them back to the HD, edit them, save them, burn them, repeat. This can be a major pain in the ass for us students. Do you really think we write those 20+ page essays in one go? (Okay, I admit; we usually download them, alter a few lines and then hope for the best.)
Also, USB pendrives are far smaller and thus nicer to carry around; some of them even can be hooked on key chains. They don't suffer from scratching either. Then again, CDs can be made bootable* while USB device booting is still a pretty rare thing as far as I can tell. Also, those little things can get quite expensive, 125,- for a 512mb, USB 2.0. (woops, that's "USB hi-speed") That said, CD-RWs are still cheaper, more compatible once you've actually burned something (nearly all CD-ROMs can read a CD-RW) and CD-ROM drives are always on the front side, as opposed to PCs with only USB connection on the rear...
Hate me!
Ok, I admit, I didn't read the article. Why? Because I looked at the drives they're reviewing and knew it was pointless.
First off, they're reviewing the previous generation of DVD burners. The new Pioneer A06 is a multi-format drive, capable of burning everything but DVD-RAM (which is a dead standard - it required usage of caddies and was incompatible with stand alone DVD players). The Plextor and Panasonic are so-so drives at best. They didn't review the Sony, which is considered the other "best" drive (Pioneer and Sony have been the only two major players until recently), which is also multi-format.
There are a ton of new companies on the DVD burner front too -- LiteOn, NEC, Mitsumi, etc. which I suspect OEM either the Sony or Pioneer drives (no, I haven't looked into it enough to know for sure).
If you want a real resource for DVD burner comparisons, don't even bother with Techspot. Their "review" is about 6 months out of date. Instead go to DVDR Help, which is pretty much the place for anything you could want to know about DVD players, burners, software, etc.
Format wars are essentially over too... most new (and even most 2-3 year old) players can read any of the formats except DVD-RAM. The new burners can write any format you choose, and are at or under $200 now (pricing from NewEgg). Buying a single format burner is just silly.
Honestly though, unless you're burning home videos then you're probably still better off with a CD-RW drive. At under $50 it's hard to go wrong, and there's a lot more computers with CD drives than DVD drives. On the other hand, more games are starting to come out on DVD now (HL2 will be, as well as CD and via Steam), so you may want a DVD drive in your computer (although DVD-ROMs are only $30-40, so CD-RW + DVD-ROM is less than half the price and gives you 2 drives).
The school I work at is in the process of dumping all of our zip drives on hundreds of lab and office computers, and moving exclusively to solid-state USB storage for students & staff moving files around (and floppies I suppose, if all else fails).
They'll never buy any more machines with ZIP drives in them. Too many problems with students getting disks stuck in the drive when labels peel off, corrupted filesystems & lost files, and of course, the IDE ZIP drives we have are SLOW.
I'm looking forward to it!
N.
"Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence." - Charles de Gaulle
If you shop around for media, you can find blanks pretty cheap. I think the ones I'm using now cost 1.26 a piece, which is much cheaper than hard drives.
As for movies, I bought my dvd player and burner around the same to time to ensure compatibility. I also have found that ALL of my friends home DVD players can play movies that I have recorded. And I think it would be fair to say, that most of the players have been purchased within the last two years. Of course, your experiences may vary, I have just had great luck with dvd-r/rw.
G
I wish there was a fscking blue pill
I'm sorry, but what are USB keychains for again?
If it is too big to download, I'll burn it to a CD. If it isn't, well I'll just stick it on my web site or email it to a person. The network has obsoleted floppy disks, not higher storage mediums.
At least some (many?) of us Feds don't have either on our machines...it's LAN storage, local drives and floppies for us. The pain is awful :(
I didn't think the house band in Hell would play this badly.
This set of reviews is absolutely useless. They don't do into covering the two most important things in any DVD-Burner: Player compatability and DVD-blank compatability.
All +/-R crud aside (and most of the newer drives like the Sony DRU500 and Pioneer A06 do dual format anyway), the biggest issue for someone who's going to buy a DVD burner is whether the discs they burn will play in their set top player, and other people's. This article doesn't even consider that fact.
Other posters will touch on this I'm sure - DVD's aren't the ideal backup solution. They're alright, but really what DVD is good for is storing video. I think the number of people buying DVD burners to use for backup is a whole lot smaller than the audience who actually want to make DVDs they can play on their television, or bring to their friend's house.
Finally, all these drives are OLD news. The A05 has already been superceded by the A06 from Pioneer, the review doesn't mention a Sony drive at all, and Plextor has just announced their new 8x DVD+R/4x DVD-R burner that will come out sometime in the next month. Perhaps if this review was posted maybe 4 months ago it would be relevant.
I could recommend a bunch of sites with relevant reviews, but I'd rather not get them slashdotted. Check the almighty google for reviews, hopefully ones which aren't practically devoid of useful information like this one.
"I want to get more into theory, because everything works in theory." -John Cash
As expected, the case for the impeachmentment of the Cheney-Rumsfeld regime grows as we learn more about the forged case for war
Thanks in advance,
W00t
If possible, I would wait until that hits the marked: Plextor PX-708A
Um... like THAT's an authoritative answer? Dude, stop posting AC and we might buy it. But anyone can claim to be the loser I know who definitely is posting all the GNAA bullshit on /. as of late. There are a few copycats, but I know that guy who came up with it. You're a stupid motherfucking asshole. If anyone is the racist and the bigot, it's you. I dare you to find a truly black gay male who would run around like an idiot saying "I'm a gay nigger". You're a total fuckflap. Go shoot yourself now.
A 747 has a cargo volume of 703 cubic meters. Assuming you can fit 384 50-disc spindles per cubic meter, that means the 747 can carry 13497600 CDs. Let's say they're recordable DVDs holding 4.7 GB of information apiece. That would be 63438720 GB of information, or a little over 63 petabytes (63,000 terabytes). Over a 20-hour flight, that translates into 881.093 GB/s of bandwidth. A lot of bandwidth indeed.
Buy a Dell:
r s_2003- ford.htm
Boot from Bootable USB Flash Memory Drive
http://www.dell.com/us/en/gen/topics/vecto
But how long does a burned DVD last? That is my question. I don't want to burn a disk with all my digital photos on it only to find out 5 years later that the dye (or whatever is on a DVD) fades and is no longer readable.
Outdoor digital photography, mostly in New Engl
and had a DVD burner 2 years ago. No, Apple does'nt innovate anything, do they? :/
Seriously, my MP3 collection is about 15 GB, and that is just the stuff I have taken the time to rip. My CD collection would easily be 10 times that, if I ever get around to digitizing them.
Granted, putting 15 GB on DVDs would be time consuming, but compared to CDRs, it is phenominal. I am kind of holding out for the blue lasers though.
What could you use a DVD+-R for? How about imaging your system for instant restores? Hard to do with CDRs. Disk drives are getting bigger, and we are finding ways to fill them.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
DVD-RAM may be crap, but if you REALLY want it all you've got to wait for the Iomega Super DVD All Format 4X
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
Actually, I think Zip disks (and superDisks etc) are going away/gone already because they were too much of a middle step. They were bigger than floppies, but smaller than CDs, and yet the price of 100MB disks never dropped below about $10US each. This meant that they were not disposable the way $0.50 floppies are, and yet don't have the capacity of a CD.
"Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one " -Albert Einstein
Honestly, I've known Cliés to be pretty slick (I love my PEG-NV90) in the past, but this thing is just plain hideous. Did Sony fire their design team or something?
If your theory is different from practice, then your theory is wrong.
I guess if your looking burn DVD video, then yes go buy a DVD burner, but if it is for storage, just buy another hard drive. You can pick up an external USB 2.0 drive enclosure for $25 if you're looking to take stuff on the road.
It will always take 11-12 pieces of media to back up my stuff. Currently that's 11-12 CDR's, it used to be 10-12 floppies, then 10-12 zip disks. So, I'm not due to upgrade to a DVD writer for a little bit.
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
It's all very well to rave about using a DVD burner as a backup device but AFAIK there still isn't a Windows server OS that supports DVD burning yet. I haven't looked at this for a couple of months but I was researching this on a couple of HP Servers we had that only had a gig or so of data to be backed up. Pricewise a DVD kills any of the proprietary tape solutions. Tape software is bloated and overly complicated to use and you can only restore files to a server that has the same type of SCSI drive installed in it. DVD backup would greatly simplify the data only backup process for many many small businesses and yet they still get shafted on backup hardware and software that really shouldn't be required in this day and age.
I think it's a conspiracy between the tape vendors and M$. You can't image a Windows Server and you can't backup files on a Windows server using a DVD drive. It would be an ideal solution for many small businesses but the only way to backup files is to do it from a workstation.
It's a real shame too. When a 40GB SCSI tape solution costs $1500+ and most servers come with 80GB of disk space minimum you start to wonder what the backup industry has been doing over the past 7 or 8 years while the hard drive manufacturers have added so much more space to store data.
That's my 2c
John the Kiwi
CDBurners were very much the end for ZIP drives.
After CDBurners became common, Zip drives were still often used by people who needed to carry around large files (from MS Office or Adobe programs) and edit them on multiple computers. Offices that had poor ethernet connectivity were the last bastion of the Zip disk. But today, USB keychains are conquering that territory.
It does seem that CD-RW drives could've invaded that space, if using software that convincingly emulated a normal read-write filesystem. But apparently such software never reached the level of penetration/reliability needed to succeed.
Since then I've owned three different burners myself and exchanged discs with many people, and the one consistent "feature" seems to be you never know exactly when (or why) a disc will just "go bad." I've had discs that worked one week suddenly refuse to respond the next week even when trying to pull the data off with something like isobuster. I've lost I don't know how many thousands of files like this (no, not just porn) and it's not just discs from my own drives; I can watch one of four discs of the scifi channel's "Dune" series because the other three, which I got from a friend, simply refuse to play. Why? I don't know; there's no shmutz on the disc, and I can't find a single hole.
And that's the other thing: what happened to EFM and redundancy and storing nonconsecutive bits on the disc? A single tiny pinhole should NOT be making an entire file (or, if it's big enough, an entire disc) unreadable. The TDK I got a decade ago can still be read through many scratches. I can only assume it's because of the increased speed we all record at - which tells me that these DVDs - already an incredibly fragile format even in "store bought" form - are going to be even less reliable than CDR. No way in hell will I ever again trust my data to a CD "backup" alone - much less a DVD.
So far as I can see all these are good for is making DVDs - and who cares about those old fashion things any more? Sure, it's alright for bringing home a box of bits from the store - but if you're going to trade with a friend it's just as easy to stick a hard drive in a box. And the data transfer is faster, and the media, ultimately, far more reliable.
My comment was a reply to that assertion of the original post, which tried to assert that cdburners were the reason for the drop in use of floppies and their related (ZIP) products.
"But remember, most lynch mobs aren't this nice." (H.Simpson)
-- Joe
indiDVD dvd+/-r writer. I can tell you I have 2 new dvd players that refuse to read any +R media.. My computer dvd drives also will not read them. I've always had best luck with compatibility with DVD-R's and high quality media.
Technically speaking, most ROM is RAM.
CD-ROMs are RAM. So are DVD-ROMs, regardless of how many extra plusses, minusses and Rs there may be in the marketing name.
The only kind of non-RAM ROM I can think of off the top of my head (which isn't part of a copy protection scheme) would by vinyl LPs and tapes with the read-only tag set.
Of course, you can access tracks on an LP out of order, too, so maybe even they don't count.
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
"I could settle this would standards mess with $200."
That sentence makes zero sense, mate.
Like the other would recomend dvdrhelp { or their old URL VCDHELP } for up to the SECOND review, info, what player will play what and tools.
IE one stop searching!
> Windows 98 first edition and Win95, neither of
> which supported filesystems on USB devices
My Win98 FE box supports my USB digital camera as a filesystem. Hmm, not sure if it's read-only or not, though.
That said, I upgraded to IE6. Maybe MS secretly slurped in new USB and filesystem support DLLs, it wouldn't suprise me.
Or maybe the Kodak drivers work some magic.
Who knows, I don't get windows. Give me devfsadm/format/newfs/mount any day, at least I can understand what the hell is going on. Windows is worse than the freakin' automounter.
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
Avast, substitute "whole" for "would", and ye shall get the answers ye seek. Yar, I forgot to preview... yar.
Slashdotter are stupid and biased.
The Sony models that do four formats (DVD-R, DVD-RW, DVD+R, DVD+RW) at 4x speed are going for US$225.
None of the reviewed burners do that.
To be left out of the compairision is like discussing hard drives without mentioning Western Digital.
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Because the 100 MB zip disks still costs a lost less than a 128 MB keychain drive and if your friend loses the zip disk it's not so much of a loss as the whole keychain drive.
Nevertheless, I still ditched the zip drive storage and have a 256 MB Jumpdrive keychain drive from Lexar. And FYI I have seen these thing up to 2 GB in size (at insane price points to boot.) I just wanted to make a point. [Sorry, I can't link to the lexarmedia.com page with the Jumpdrive I have because I am on a POS Win95 machine with only MSIE4.0 behind an NTLM proxy and lexar's page redirects you to a web standards site.]
And one other important bit of advice if you are looking for a USB thumb drive: They have those tricky USB naming conventions in full swing: USB 2.0 AKA USB 2.0 "full speed" is not as good as USB 2.0 "hi-speed." Most of the cheaper drives advertise themselves as USB 2.0 even though they only do 11 Mbit/s. The one I got actually reads and writes using true USB 2.0 speeds. The only reliable way I have found of distinguishing this is to look at the actual advertised read and write speeds. Do your homework!
"The only significant delay was Windows 98 first edition and Win95, neither of which supported filesystems on USB devices. 98SE and beyond did."
Actually WinME and on supported the keychain drives. For win98/se you need a special downloaded driver. For win95 you simply can't use them because it does not support USB. (Well there was limited USB support in Win95 OSR2.5/C but not enough for these drives.)
Okay, fuckies, I have mplayer and mencoder installed on my cocksucking Linux box. How in the living FUCK can I rip a dvd from the motherfucking thing, using mencoder, and throw that shit on a fucking cd so I can play the god damned thing on my Sony Vaio (the fucking tiny UCG-101 cocksucker without the god damned motherfucking cdrom drive)?
Yeah, I've seen the god damned cocksucking motherfucking "3 pass tutorial", but jesus living fucking CHRIST, just give me a one-liner for fuck's sake! Explain it to me like I'm a living retard! I just want to rip it from the motherfucking dvd and encode it as a fucking avi or something. Oh, I want the jesus fucking christ'n subtitles as well, for the love of fuck!
(Oh, sorry about my motherfucking language. It might be a bit fucking 'colourful', but that doesn't make it a fucking troll! So stick THAT in your cocksucking pipe and smoke it, you moderator-point-holding fuckwads.)
Arg. Sorry about that last post. The first "sentence" was not a complete sentence.
> . "Roundup", hardly. Three drives does not a roundup make :(
I was hoping they were going to teach us how to grind our spare DVDs (i.e. the developer ones Microsoft sends me every month which I never open) into a fine paste to use as weed killer.
If I could find a decent weed killer that I could mass-produce on my own, it would be much easier to mass-produce my killer weed.
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
My favorite are the keychain size SD or CF readers. They are FULL replacements for zip disks as they go at capacities up to 4 Gigs and the medias are exchangeable for use infinite expansion and filing.
As soon as I buy a -R drive +R would become the standard, and if I bought a +R drive -R would become the standard.
Just buy one of those 10 or 15-bay external drive towers. Then, you'd have room for each DVD standard as it emerges while keeping all the old DVD drives around for legacy support. You should also get a PCI expansion enclosure, so you can be sure to have enough SCSI controllers to handle all the external drive towers you will eventually get.
With six PCI slots plus a built-in host adapter, you could, in theory, support 7x15=105--yes, that's 105--DVD standards before needing more PCI slots and SCSI controllers.
I'd say you would need only $15,000 to guarantee 100% compatibility with all the DVD discs you might come across. At such an affordable price point, why are you hesitating?!?
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
I would love to purchase a multi-format DVD burner, but it's difficult (read: impossible) to find one with a SCSI interface. (I'm a SCSI purist, at least for one of my machines anyway.) In fact, the only SCSI DVD burners I've been able to find at all are a Pioneer one which only does DVD-R and cost ~$3000 and a Panasonic which costs ~$300 but only burns DVD-RAM. :o(
Anyone have any ideas as to when SCSI multi-format DVD burners will be made availible at a sub-$400 pricepoint. And if they won't be any ideas as to why not?
I don't even know if this is still a problem, but I haven't used a Zip drive since I lost an archive to the infamous Click of Death. I have a 64Mb USB drive on my keychain which works just fine for getting stuff from work and back.
Sure burning DVD's is the way to go but remember when they created the the dual VCR's to watch one and tape on the other. Well my view is this remember the way the Video clubs got hip to this and made sure you couldn't copy VCR's anymore. What will happen when they do the same thing to the DVD's then what unless you borrows a friend movie to burn it for yourself it's completely worthless. They now have DVD's that once open the DVD destroys itself to prevent burning. I know that bootleg DVD are at an all time high and I'm a collector of many movies. I wonder if you can burn the DVD will you still have the 5.1 dobly sound for us with surround sound systems those are question you ask yourself before buy the DVD burners. Sorry to all about this but I'm not really sure if it's a good idea it would raise the price of the movies on DVD. One more thing the one when you can change your VCR tapes to DVD is a good buy if you have hundreds of VCR tapes then that's the way to go may god bless you all.
For all of those that had witness let me give you one of my favorite sayings "Ph34r My M4d Skillz"
I'd settle for a multi-volume CDR backup system that works (on linux, particularly, but I'm also looking for windows solutions). (Mondo looks promising, but it is entirely too complicated.)
What do you do when you have many gigabytes to backup to a series of 700MB discs? Especially, what do you do when some of your files are larger than the volume size?
I know how to do it the hard way, using multivolume tar and having a script pause, make an iso out of each volume, and cdrecord each one. Restoring from that isn't exactly fun though.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
"most BIOS makers" might catch up sooner than you think. Just bought one of these (for MAME cabinet project) and USB is suppported as a boot device, although I've not tried it yet. Quite a lot of PC for £60(GBP) !
troll
DVD burners and whatnot are standard options, but floppy drives are still virtually mandatory with a new system. Why? They simply won't die. People mucking around in DOS, setting up multi-boots, and a thousand other tasks need the quick, cheap, and bootable features of a floppy.
My gripe is that they're intolerably slow, and nobody seems to care. It's a 1.44mb device - why can't someone make a 100% hardware floppy emulation device that is similar to a USB keychain? It would need to be 100% hardware so that no drivers would be needed for very old operating systems. It would have to effectively fool the system into thinking it's a floppy - but read and write at RAM speeds instead of floppy speeds.
I'd buy it.
# Erik
You're right about offices being the last bastion of Zip drives.
A lot of large corporations have also been holding on tight to NT 4, and are just now making the transition to 2000/XP ( including my company ). I can finally use my MuVo for more than just playing mp3s.
Our company has standardized on the Zip disk for years for use in areas where network connectivity is impossible / unlikely. This includes moving documents between classified and unclassified networks, and moving files around in the labs and in the field.
One reason CD-R / RW never beat out Zip disks here is user friendlyness - a factory installed zip drive can be accessed exactly like any other drive via explorer. Burning a CD was not so trivial until recently, but even improvements on the format to allow seamless Read / Write like Mount Rainier are still not compatible with all PCs unless you install the software on all PCs. I'm betting on the solid-state drives, myself.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
why would you use +R for archiving vs -R? +R media is definitely more expensive around here BTW
-- the cake is a lie
It'd be good if Windows could make up it's mind whether or not it needs a driver disk for the bloody things! Sometimes it works, other times it needs drivers installed. Strangely, when it does need them, it seems to need them installed twice! This is independant of whether its xp, or 2000. And of course, there's the laughable lack of USB support on NT...
Prices for hard drives are so low that it really is cheaper and less hassle to just backup data onto a second hard drive. The only problem you run into is that if you aren't disciplined about it and start putting data on your backup drive it becomes rather worthless in its backup capacity.
Much cheaper than tape, and with incremental backups I can do nightly backups of my whole system.
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And motorola. And IBM.
Y'know, TechSpot is hosing under the slashdotting, the article is incredibly skimpy on details, and only covers three drives.
n de x.html
OTOH, Tom's did a drive looky looky a few months ago with six drives; it's quite a bit better.
http://www6.tomshardware.com/storage/20030207/i
StoneCypher is Full of BS
It rocks. I have one. With Ritek G03 or G04 media (G03 is 1x that reliably burns at 2x with hacked firmware, $1.20/disc or so, G04 is 4x media, $1.80/disc in small quantities and dropping around 20 cents/month), I have not had a single coaster.
Optodisc RW media is a different story. It's worse than 1x Princo -R. 50% of one batch had visible defects, and none read reliably in my laptop.
It is true that the DVR-106 is just a 105 with new firmware. ONE chip has changed, and it's been confirmed that it is functionally identical. The only issue now is that the burner has a calibration EEPROM on it, and if Pioneer changed the EEPROM layout (i.e. what byte is what), then flashing 106 FW into a 105 won't work. Apparently someone has used the control board from a 106 and the remaining hardware from a 105 and it burned + media flawlessly.
The Pioneer drives are the most popular with large-scale duplication houses, and also the Pios are what Apple has chosen for their SuperDrives. (The SuperDrives are all DVR-10x drives. Older ones are 103s, later 104s, and now 105s.)
Using a +R drive is asking for a compatibility nightmare. Dell's latest laptops have an optional DVD+R/RW drive made by Philips, the creator of the +R/RW atrocity, and it has trouble burning discs recognizable in any other drive.
http://www.firmware-flash.com/ is a good place for info on various people's experiences with DVD+-R drives. The Sony dual-format isn't all that it's cracked up to be, the firmware sucks and refuses to burn many 4x discs at 4x.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Seriously. I bought a combo-drive iBook expecting to use it a lot, and honestly with portable hard drives being so cheap and holding a lot more data, we have stopped using the cd burners in our office and just take a dual interface (USB2/Firewire) hard drive around to the schools to offload data too important to send over the network, or to back up the hard drives. If its a small file, just use our 30 dollar key disks. I even thought I would use the drive to burn backups, but my iPod and my external 40 gig both have any data I need to save. I really cant see getting a DVD R for anything other than burning a movie from a DV camera.
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
um.. why should I get an account just to please you, asshole?
and if you know the person who started it, why dont you reveal all? what is stopping you?
racist asswipe
Everything is standardized.
Any DVD-R drive will work with DVD-R aware software under Linux.
Same with DVD+R - FYI, all DVD-R recording software under Linux is based on cdrecord in some manner, while DVD+R requires some oddball program called "growisofs".
Both DVD-R and DVD+R work under Linux. The software for -R seems more mature though.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Amen -- AND, the security policies (i.e. horrible "lockdown" software like Fortres) in place at your high school/college/university/work place may prevent you from using a USB keychain device, whereas the CD-ROM drive is usually allowed since it is used for software and whatnot..
I don't have a dual-format drive.
With the exception of my first-gen Creative 1X DVD drive, -R discs burned by my Pioneer DVR-105 worked flawlessly everywhere.
-RWs also work flawlessly on every player I've tried except for my friend's Toshiba player, although Nero CDSpeed shows a lot more "jitters" in the read speed with Sony -RWs in my laptop's LG DRN-8080B. TBH, it's a POS drive as far as reading capability. I never had an Optodisc RW that didn't have read errors somewhere on the disc. As to the one disc that didn't read in my friend's player, it's likely that the problem was in the file layout on the disc and not the fact that it was RW vs R.
Meanwhile, I frequent the Dell customer support forums, and the DVD+R drive included on recent Dells has trouble burning discs readable on ANY other drive. This is a Philips drive, the CREATORS of the +R nightmare (Yes, Philips is to blame for the existence of a second format.), and even they can't get compatibility right.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
you can buy a Lexar 256MB USB 2.0 drive for $75. (It is normally $110.)
No, I'm not affiliated w/ CompUSA or Lexar, but I picked one up the other day and it really is quite handy. Now if my laptop had built-in USB 2.0...
(I have a USB 2.0 PC Card, but built-in would be nice.)
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
I rarely playtest movies in RWs, as for copied movies I can usually get it right the first time.
For self-authored movies, I always use RW for testing. Same goes for my DVD version of Knoppix. (KNX is the ONLY thing I've used CD-RWs for in my life, BTW.)
I also keep my MP3 collection on DVD-R, since that changes once in a while.
I would use RW more often if it weren't for the issue of labeling the disc. I don't want to label an RW as one thing, and then later burn it with something else. MP3 collections are an exception, since I can just label it "MP3s" and the label will always be correct, all of the rest of my RWs are unlabeled "temporary" discs.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Check your DMA settings.
Even a 48x CD-R uses less than 1-2% CPU on a 1.1 GHz Athlon, unless DMA has somehow been turned off. Then even 24x will peg the CPU...
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
There are quite a few companies here in MI that strip CDRs and/or sound cards from all new systems before deploying. For example the Detroit Medical Center (or at least the areas I'm familiar with, no I don't work there) strips sound cards but leaves CDRs. They also use some of the default M$ policy/login stuff to make sure the important program icons are available and lock out some of the basic things people like to change. The system works fairly well, gameplaying is forbidden but people can install games and play them without sound.
One problem is unrestricted Internet access, although you can't burn CDs and thus chew up bandwidth/etc that way, you can get an interesting assortment of spy/malware on your system. I've seen a couple breakroom computers that were loading all sorts of interesting banners and web pages automatically, good thing they didn't have modems 'cause there was a dialer in there someplace. The policy restricts Joe User from doing anything about it, so it goes to tech support. Too many times companies fixate on certain issues to the exclusion of all else, and it ends up hurting them in the end. Probably one of the main reasons I'm in consulting now, I get paid to tell them in what ways they need to wake up.
Jonah Hex
Horror & SciFi Erotic Nudes
Just a random factoid for DVD burner shoppers, apparently Lite-On and Sony have a partnership of some sort producing drives together, so Lite-On drives are just Sony drives under a different name. I love Lite-On, and hopefully the Lite-Ons will sell for less than the Sony.
This is secondhand info, so I'm not 100 percent sure.
I belong to the ______ generation.
Macs will boot off them
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
I think it's fairly safe to assume that this article shouldn't have even made news on /. Since there are new multiformat drives out already and the +r format is useless for most desired uses (ie backing video DVDs up, or copying your PS2 games)I'm really surprised that this even got posted.
-Pale
Considering that TDK is currently marketing "Armor Plated" DVD-Rs that supposedly have some sort of protective coating.
2x the price of 4x Ritek media for a 1x disc, but if durability is your thing, a few "Armor Plateds" are probably worth it.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
The biggest users of Zip disks has to be the print/publishing business. Ad agencies, book publishers, print shops, et al, all have stacks and stacks and STACKS of Zip disks lying around.
The first biggest problem was the price. The per disk cost is still up around $10. I worked at a book publisher and then an ad agency, and I can't tell you how many Zip disks we sent out that were unreturned, in spite of the fact that everyone we send them to knows about the high media cost.
Second, Iomega took too freakin long to get to 750 MB. They were upgraded to 250 MB just as the first wave of CD-RW drives were hitting the market. 650 MB CD-R media prices were in free fall, finally settling at around $1/per, just about the time Iomega came out with the 750 MB zip. A 750 MB Zip disk costs about $15; who the fsck is going to pay 1500% more for only 15% more space? And then who would you send a 750 MB Zip disk to?
And now that broadband internet is common in the business world, transferring 100 MB online is not a big deal anymore. Iomega has become irrelevant.
a DVD-R is a couple of gigs. BLu-rays are about 25 gigs. I'll skip a generation, thanks.
Hey, I'm just your average shit and piss factory.
Some other helpful sites:
Unofficial DVD+RW site
linux dvd+rw info and tools
Some choice quotes from linux info page:
Optorite DVD+-RW Dual Retail Drive Model DD0203
Retail Specifications:
Drive Type: Internal
Read/Write Speed:
READ (DVD+R): 4X, DVD+RW:4X;DVD-R:4X;DVD-RW:4X;DVD-ROM:12X CD-R:40X;CD-RW:40X
WRITE (DVD+R:4X;DVD-R:4X;DVD-RW4X, DVD+RW:2.4X;CD-R:24X;CD-RW:12X)
STORAGE CAPACITY: UP TO 4.7GB(DVD)
Buffer Memory: 8MB
Interface: IDE/ATAPI (ULTRA DMA MODE 2)
Screw the standards as dual format 4X DVD recorders are already under $200. Yeah, I realize you were joking too.
'He was a dreamer, a thinker, a speculative philosopher... or, as his wife would have it, an idiot.' - Douglas Adams
What I heard was that technically DVD-RAM is much better for backing up data than DVD-RW or DVD+RW.
It's true that if you want a more portable format, you need something that a normal DVD drive can read and that isn't DVD-RAM.
On the other hand I am thinking about getting the Panasonic HS2 (or their newer model the E80 I think) for recording & saving TV, and it writes to DVD-RAM so that would be another reason to have a DVD-RAM drive in my computer.
Mike
when I read your comment, I couldn't help but remember this BBC article:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/1402533.stm
PCI expansion enclosure? I'm intrigued. Do you have a link?
Someone crafts a physical scene which is likely to be photographed, and whose digital representation when photograhed is bootable and the images comprimise a machine booted from a digital camera containing pictures of the scene.
That would be awesome.
Oh, shut up. Those silly Macs will try to boot off anything that even looks like it might have a filesystem.
Those who would give up liberty in exchange for security and DRM should switch to Microsoft Palladium!
The article starts off saying "With 300 gig drives hitting pavement...." DVD drives hold about 4G of data. It doesn't sound realistic to back up a large amount of data in chunks that are approx 1/100th the size of the media. It's in the same ballpark as saying you'll use floppy drives to back up a CD's worth of data. Sure, technically you can do it... but it's not realistic.
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
Carry a Knoppix disk with you and USB support is no problem. :)
I don't think I mentioned it in my post, but Rima is where I get my media too. Their service is excellent and so are their prices. I think I mentioned those shitty Optodisc RWs - They let me exchange them for Ritek G03s without any hassle at all.
I've heard mixed things about the Princo 4X. While a lot better than the 1X Princos, I've heard that they still have some serious QC and consistency issues. (One batch will be perfect, then the next one you get will have a 50% coaster rate.) I pay extra for Riteks from Rima, but it's worth it, I have never had a flawed Ritek burn, even running the 1x G03s at 2x.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
well, provided you only backup once then the math works. If you continually do backups you have to keep buying new media. Ultimately it depends on what your wanting to do. One time backups make sense on DVD, but incremental routine backups are a pain that way.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
The Sony DRU 500 and 510 can burn any format, so there's no need to worry about which format will be "the" standard.
From the article:
"All drives were tested using a 500 MB file..."
I don't get it. I could burn that to a CDR. I thought one of the points of buying a DVD burner was to take advantage of the massive storage capacity. So shouldn't his benchmarks use a more likely average file size to test the robustness of the burner?
-- I am become sig, destroyer of posts.
You make a great point -- USB drives are great for the college market. When I was a college student (graduated this past May) I couldn't count on any computer having a working floppy disk drive -- and of those that did work, the odds of it corrupting my disks were extremely high. I can't count the number of floppies that have died at the hands of the filthy lab computers. Zips were expensive, suffered from the click of death, and not available on all computers. Solid-state USB storage would have been awesome -- no worries of what the last person had spilled on their disk or tried to shove in the drive.
PCI expansion enclosure? I'm intrigued. Do you have a link?
Sun Netra E1
This one is what popped out of my memory while figuring out the best way to support all the DVD standards. I'm not too sure whether it would work on PCs, but the E1 would allow an additional four SCSI controllers for an additional 56 DVD drives in your Sun rack-mount setup! You do have a rack of Netra servers in your living room, right? Sheesh, who doesn't anymore? (actually, I don't either...)
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
They comment on those single-standard burners like they were state-of-the-art technology, without mentioning any of the two dozens of DVD burners out there which are able to create any DVD format. See this comparison. Much better. :-)
I'm quite pleased with my Creative Muvo, an mp3 player that can also be used to carry data around. I think it's going to be very useful when I go back to uni.
I tend to agree. I am currently going back to school while working, and not only do I use USB drives and see them in use at work all the time now, but I also have been noticing them used more and more by students in the computer labs. Most of the workstations in our labs are fairly current Dell machins with front-facing USB ports, and this has been one of the most common transfer methods I have seen.
I'd love for them to catch on even more, and hopefully go past the 1 gig storage limit....my only fear is these mini-drives are even easier to lose than floppies, CD's, etc....so I would dread the day I lose my 2 gigs of stuff I felt I had to keep with me, bckups or not.
On a side note for any admins out there, my favorite use so far has been keeping my password lists and related sensitive information gpg encrypted on the pen drive, with the binaries for Windows and Unix variants I work with....this is great for traveling and still being able to get work done.
We use ghost 2003 here at work. While we do have a dual format DVD burner (Sony 500LX?), a good method is to dual partition your machine, one for OS/software.. the other (larger) for media. Image the software partition to DVD(or CD) and backup the other side to a network store. This provides an instant restore point, while being fairly cost effective. ghost 2003 has built-in firewire/usb 2.0 support for both dvd and cd burning. Finally, if you go with CD burning, it can compress more than 700 MB onto a disc (I have had discs containing over 1GB of data on them). Also, the media is bootable. So a bit off topic, but none-the-less touches on the "backup" aspect.
oh yes...they are so silly.
geesh talk about fanboy-ism.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
I'm curious if you work at a primary/secondary school or a college. The schools in my area barely have enough money to keep their current computers working and in decent shape. If there somehow were to be a lump of money lying around and it went towards buying USB keychain drives for students and facaulty to promptly lose, rather than doing something useful (e.g., putting more than 10 internet stations in the library, or upgrading their internet connection) i would be furious. Even the community college deals perfectly well with only floppy disks and the odd CDR.
Just out of curiousity, how big are the keychain drives? 32 megs? 16? 8? or bigger than that? what happens when kids bring their warez and/or mp3s to school to listen on the computers? or copy software off of them?
If you can't see the value in jet powered ants you should turn in your nerd card. - Dunbal (464142)
I wont be ready for a DVD burner until they decide on a standardized format. I know it will most likely be DVD-R/RW, but I think they have had long enough to figure it out. VCD ROCKS!
This is probably the worst reoundup I've ever seen.
Fomr the article:
DVD- is said to be less compatible than DVD+
This is actually the opposite of EVERYTHING else I've read about DVDs.
DVD- is slower
That depends on the burners out there, not on the media itself.
DVD- is having 70% of the market
That's the first time I hear figures of marketshare and it's good to see that the best media is gaining ground on it's competitor. But if it is as accurate as the two assertions above....
Ahhh.... horrible roundup. The only thing looks accurate is the burning speed, and who cares between 6.5 minutes and 5.9 ???
I would have liked to see compatibility tests and other interesting things.
Write boring code, not shiny code!
I work in a technical college. The campus policy is 3-year leases, so the machines are gradually upgraded as the lease ends. The machines do all have CD-RW drives in them right now, but they're not widely utilized (too much software-hassle).
To clarify though, the school is only upgrading in the sense that they're making sure that every machine has a USB, or USB2 port on the front for easy access, and they're specifically purchasing machines that don't have ZIP drives installed.
The students/staff will have to purchase their own USB storage devices. This is pretty much the same as students buying ZIP disks right now, although the price isn't quite as good for USB, the advantages more than make up for the headaches, imho.
I'm sure that the computer resources folk will put together a list of "recommended" models, as well as what the current list price is so students know what they can buy, and what to expect to pay at a regular store.
"Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence." - Charles de Gaulle
BLUE LASER with +20G is worth waiting a bit longer for, IMHO. That's large enough to be useful for movies (easily) and backing up data in chunks as needed. SPEED will be key or else it'll take too damn long. 4x at a minimum to start.
Hrrmmm, 4X what? Won't the first generation of drives be 1X, by definition?
1X CD is about 175 kB/sec, IIRC, which is the data rate for playback of an audio CD. 1X DVD is defined around 1350 kB/sec, although I wonder if this isn't a little arbitrary, since the MPEG2 streams are encoded at variable bitrates.
Hmm, I've been using a USB Floppy for booting on test systems at work lately. Almost all of our systems, even older (98-99) IBM Laptops will boot off of that. I should pick one up and try it as it could be an excellent Network Boot Disk.
I am (as I type this) wrestling with a Pioneer DVR-104. Ive updated MB bios, the drive's bios, this that and the other thing. Running under Windows XP Pro, and HATING the damn thing...
I figure if i'm going to wait another few months I might as well wait a few more for blue-laser dvd drives. Pioneer, Samsung, Shapr and Sony are creating a device that can burn 27gb on a single disc and NEC claims their drive can burn 38gb on a disc. These are only availble in japan right now, but should be in the US market in 2004.
The Pioneer is max 4x burning speed with DVD-R recordables.
The Panasonic is max 2x burning speed with DVD-R recordables.
So the panasonic already lost even before the shootout was started. All of these drives do either only + or - burning but not both. So if i was looking for a new DVD burner today i would leave these drives inside the shop.
I would opt for the NEC 1100A or the Pioneer DVR-A06 as they burn both + and - media. It seems however that Plextor also will bring a dual-burn (+ and - burn capabilities) drive shortly.
So if your looking for a DVD burner which should last for some time, don't buy any drive from the report. If you want a cheap reliable drive and don't mind the burning format , take either the Pioneer DVR-A05 or the Plextor PX-504A.
Robert
or just try and pass this amazing insight off as your own?
One thing for OSX users to keep in mind is that iDVD will only work with the Apple drives. However the Apple drives are actually Pioneer drives. So if you want to buy a DVD writer and use the rather nice iDVD you should get a Pioneer DVR-103 or DVR-104.
>Witness the Betamax, nicer smaller cartridges
;-)
nicer smaller SHORTER cartridges. As in, can't fit most movies on a single tape without using a lower quality than VHS SP speed.
>and the Apple Macintosh, with it's user base of hysterically proselytising devotees.
Hmmm, superior because it's missing two mouse buttons? Or superior because if the power goes out you have to disassemble the unit to remove your floppy disk? Or superior because you can't turn it on without a keyboard?
Just wondering which makes it better!
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
Yes had zip dropped the price of their media, they would have lasted longer. Their greatest flaw was not implementing the floppy form factor. They did this so they could patent their disc configuration and prevent competing media from entering the market.
Had LS-120 gotten their act together a little sooner, I think you would see LS-120 standard on most PCs today. As it was, the deep market penetration by Zip squelched changed for LS-120.
Yes CD-RW was a big pressure on both, but I think one (not both) could have made it if they effectively replaced a disk part cheaply like CD-RW burners did.
-------- -------- Support Wesley Clark for president!!!
I'm buying a model of DVD burner with support for DVD-R/RW and DVD-RAM. I believed the DVD-RW was useful only for movie production and not for backing up PC Data. Other than the physical endurance of DVD-RAM, isn't there another difference in how data can be put on it?
One of the first posters on this item mentioned that his NEC burner wasn't too bad on the ears. Does anyone offhand know of a good review that evaluates the relative noise output of DVD burners?
I'm just yanking your chain. Just a couple years ago I was a long, long time Mac user and strong advocate. A few years before that, I was a Mac developer.
But don't you agree that booting should be difficult? You should at least have to configure a complex boot loader that has many little things which can go wrong, making your system unbootable. Heaven forbid that the system can just boot off the right system folder, no matter where it is, and no matter what name it is given. Or that you could rename, and relocate the system folder without ever having to reboot. And on the next reboot, the same system folder will be booted from (even if you have multiple system folders, and some other one is now moved into the old location and given the old name).
Those who would give up liberty in exchange for security and DRM should switch to Microsoft Palladium!
Buy an IDE burner. They're much more cost effective and only slightly less reliable than SCSI.
I don't have a DVD and don't know diddly about them. What the hell is all this + and - crap?
I see dozens of variations of it too like
DVD +++RW-BF+HQ--BLA-BLA
DVD+WTF ???
I'm serious, someone please explain all this stupid nomenclature. I want to buy one but don't want to get a bone in the ass in the process.
Digital camera drivers are actually USB mass storage drivers.
W2K and XP does not require any drivers for USB disks. Your disk may be faulty.
It'd be good if Windows could make up it's mind whether or not it needs a driver disk for the bloody things! Sometimes it works, other times it needs drivers installed. Strangely, when it does need them, it seems to need them installed twice! This is independant of whether its xp, or 2000. And of course, there's the laughable lack of USB support on NT...
:)
Not to rain on your parade, but we have yet to see a USB storage device fail to install and work properly the first time on any Win2K or XP based system in our testing labs, and we process more systems than most companies do in a lifetime.
Additionally, NT (Assuming you are referring to 4.0 and earlier) was developed before the USB specification was even finalized or available in hardware.
If you can find 'native' USB support in Linux, any *nix, or OS in 1995-1996 I'll eat your hat.
In OS reference for USB, it won't be until 2.6 of the Linux kernel that the full USB specification makes it into Linux along with finally supporting the full Plug and Play specification that is over seven years old. (And why is NT 4.0 laughable again? - it even had Plug and Play back 1996. So why we are all laughing, let's give Linux a big chuckle as well.)
"we have yet to see a USB storage device fail to install and work properly the first time on any Win2K or XP based system in our testing labs"
What brand. I`ve been using OnlyDisk.
"NT (Assuming you are referring to 4.0 and earlier) was developed before the USB specification was even finalized or available in hardware."
Yeah, NT4, SP6. You`re saying NT can't be service packed to support new hardware?
"(And why is NT 4.0 laughable again? - it even had Plug and Play back 1996."
Only the lack of USB support is laughable. I`m not really knocking NT - it was the first stable MS OS and I use it most days at work.
I'm seeing a lot of talk about good burners, bad burners, but nobody mentioned SCSI burners. Optical drives used to be available in SCSI before they were out in IDE. Did SCSI DVD+-RW fall by the wayside, or what?
I don't want to discuss the relative merits of SCSI vs IDE. I'm just wondering what people like in the SCSI arena.
The VHS / BETA debate still rages today.
I have a friend in professional video editing and anything that is not digital is BETA. The reason for this is higher quality.
The reason you have a hard time finding consumer grade BETA machines is because of price.
So, you are partially right. The superior standard lost out to a cheaper alternative. More consumers = more machines = more media.
The whole debate will be settled soon when one company breaks away and starts selling the media for cheap (as in hard liquor) and garners the bigger market share. It wont be any of the big players either. They all have to worry about content handling and DRM. Look for a smaller media company to emerge as the market leader, and that format will prevail. Mark my words. Some unpronouceable company in a middle Asian country will put out one cheap player and one cheap media...= PROFIT!!
So the analogy is not wrong, but needs to be followed through to it's logical end.
"Patience is thinly veiled despair, diguised as virtue."
I don't even have a computer, you insensitive clods!
The best planning can be done after the project completes.
I figure the way motherboards are dirt dcheap, it would just be cheaper to buy a bunch of them, load 'em into a rack, and go from there. Even mini-ITX boards are under $99.
The only thing missing is WinDVD or any other playback software, a program that should come with EVERY DVD drive!
I'd be quite happy to purchase a drive that didn't include software that I may already have, or can't use on my operating system, in the purchase price.
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!
True, it's strictly a -R(-RW) burner, and it's top speed is 2x, but given that I've burned at least 200 DVD's so far with 100% compatibility to normal DVD read only drives and zero coasters, I have to sing it's praises.
It makes me all tingly.
"Powers. I have them."
or you could dasiy chain all of the drives off of each other using your four USB ports and support up to 508 devices.
you know what!!! I have seen the light...your right. and not only that, the boot files should be easily coruptable so the system will fail to boot and force you to loose all you work!!!
gosh, what have I been thinking!!!
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
NT4 is especially laughable because USB ports had been showing up on motherboards (a few brands like shuttle and i think intel) for about a year by mid 1996.
NT4 is especially laughable because USB ports had been showing up on motherboards (a few brands like shuttle and i think intel) for about a year by mid 1996.
Yep, and even at the time, the manufacturers did NOT even have ANY driver support. I was in the PC OEM business at the time, and even though they were there, NO OS could use them until 1997 when a few third party drivers started appearing.
Additionally, NT4 was released in mid 1996, which means the driver and feature set was completed in 1995.
(BTW - You also forgot to mention ASUS in your cute little mainboard list - as ASUS was one of the Built in USB connection leaders of the time. And they didn't have drivers for any OS at the time either.)