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DVD-Rs go 8x
DiZASTiX writes "It seems that the next speed level for DVD Writers is here. "The race for Xs is still on and Plextor has gone into the lead with the PX-708A, what Plextor claims is the first commercialized 8X DVD recorder. At this speed, a 4.5 GB DVD+R takes under 9 minutes to record. That is about the same as a CD in just over a minute. What we wanted to know was whether the reliability and compatibility of blank supports suffer from this breakneck speed...""
Actually ...
its DVD+R at 8x and DVD-R at 4x
Both the minus and the plus consortiums have announced such players, and have them in demo versions.
Philips intends to release to oem's its dual layer writer around about the same time it releases its 12X drive - which is sometime in febuary. Expect them on the shelves in March.
(The dual layer writer will only go at 2.4X at first though - and when you're burning a single disc and it takes two hours, you will care about speed.)
I've had the Plextor drive in question now for bit over a week. Works like charm. Using Maxell's 4x DVD+R discs, which the drive detects to be 'good enough' for 8X, I've now written about a dozen of these with zero problems. It's a Plextor after all, which roughly translates to being the Ferrari of the optical drives...
So yes, based on my personal experience, while Plextor's 708A costs an arm & leg compared to low end DVDRW drives, it works as advertised and burns at 8X without problems to DVD+R discs. Have not tried DVD-R yet, but according to documentation, it's limited to 4X.
Wow, doesn't anybody read DVD sites around here? Phillips has already demoed a 16X and in RPMs that's roughly equivalent to a 48X CDR, so it's not all that amazing.
And as for the dual layers, that's a known quantity as well. The 8.5 dual layer 8 speed drives are supposed to be hitting the shelves before March 04. As for the price on the dual layer media, well that's another issue. Personally, I'm watiting for it though. No hurry. When the media is good and cheap I'll be good and ready.
And BTW, DVD media production costs for 8X media are currently around US0.30 cents a disc. So, if you're paying fifty cents or more consider how much markup you're forking over.
You just need to by the right media.
We've (philips) gotten our drives to >99.9% reliability on all branded 4X media that we have been able to find. 8x media is a lot harder to find right now - you *can* burn at 8x on some 4x media (we used verbatim) but it is, as you say, less reliable.
The branded 8x media (there are really only two manufacturers, branded by multiple people) are reliable for 8x writing, but you will probvably want to find which of the two works better for your particular drive.
12x and 16x are going to be really quite evil, since we are having to develop on 8x media and just kinda hope that the 12x / 16x stuff will come along and still work.
I'm guessing what you meant to say was that it takes about a minute longer than a CD to burn, but I don't know how that involves the words "same" or "in."
He means it takes just over a minute for the DVD writer to write 700 MB. 4.5 GB in 9 minutes means 700 MB in about 80 seconds, on average.
Hell, if my 52x burner took 8 minutes to burn a CD, I would be pissed.
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I think he meant that the burn rate is about the same as a CD that could be burned in one minute.
Remember 1x in regular CD's equals something around 150KB/s while in DVD's it's around 1.35MB/s. Those speeds are for typical CD and DVD readers/writers while DVD+R/RW has an even different definition of the speed of 1x.
I have a small 1 to 2 DVD duplicator that I never use at anything above 1x. Why? Because even at 1x, every dozen times or so it makes a couple of $1.79 drink costers. At 2x, it does that every other time! Sure, the drives are about 6 months old, but they shouldn't be failing so soon. That is, unless they are tring to boost DVD-R drive sales.
I bought the Plextor px708a last week, and I must say that it's amazingly fast. Plextor has a list of supported media on their site. More media to follow as they still update the firmware.
I tried it with two different kinds of Verbatim DVD+R 4x (43231,43211). It works at 8 speed (under 9 minutes to burn "backups" of your DVD collection). Burned over 20 disks, zero toasters up until now.
The PX708a has some Plextor specific goodies to make sure speed of burning is optimized for the media (bad media will slow down the burning).
Needless to say that the px708a is also one of the best & fastests CDR burners around at the moment (under 3 minutes to burn a 700 Mb ISO).
IANAL, but imagine a beowulf cluster of in Soviet Russia all your belong are base to us welcoming the new SCO overlords.
Here is a story about how laser output, drive speed and media properties is related in getting faster DVD writers:o nele_27449 0.html
http://neasia.nikkeibp.com/nea/200311/c
After getting it for my bday on halloween. Upgrading the firmware. It truly does what's advertised. On select media, if conditions are right it burns at (6x start, 8x finish). A Ripped DVD+R movie at 8x on 4x media plays fine in the $40 dvd player. or chipped ps2 (of course i only copy games for backup purposes).
You can also burn dvd-rw at 2x (no 4x dvd+rw to rest) and that plays in the dvd player and ps2.
The dvd-r's only burn at 4x, but play in the DVD and ps2 player.
The CD-rw's dont got any, but the CD-R's burn in like 3 minutes flat (audio/vcd) and play inthe car/ps2/dvd player.
Hell i got 8 vcd pr0n mpegs, threw them in a nero dvd data disc, and the mpegs just listed in the menu and played in the dvd-player.
rewritables are the affordable option. Since 99% of the data is trash, i'd rather see 8X DVD+RW or DVD-RW, but im sure the media giants backing the development of the drives don't want that! not right now
lol
Great drive. Burns 40x audio cd's on 24x media flawlessly, i explicitly disabled speed control to see if it would create too many errors on the pimp azz imation 24x nope.
Basically plextor own j00.
Power of 10 nothing, CD-R's break apart at roughly the equivilant of 100-150X CDROM which would only be ~20-30X DVD drives. 60-100K RPM is the hard numbers, which is for an undamaged disk, damaged disk can go at slightly over 25K RPM's which is the speed of a 48X CDROM or an 8X DVD player.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
DVDs seem too new to trust my data to.
The current crop of DVD+/-R(W) drives are indeed about as mature as the first bunch of CD-R(W) drives were at this point. They're a bit sensitive as to which media you use and the planets have to be aligned properly. For DVD media, I only buy the major brands (Imation sells a 25-disc spindle at around $50) and I've had *mostly* good luck. Lately the drive was failing (lots of coasters even at 1x) but then I rebuilt the box and the drive suddenly became reliable again.
As to the data integrity issue... I usually burn around 3.0-3.5 Gb of data onto the DVD and fill the rest with parity data using QuickPar. Gives me an easy way to check the disc for errors that are more then the underlying RS encoding can handle and lets me possibly still recover the files.
Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?
Keep in mind that the buffer you specify at the command line is a software buffer, and not nearly as quick as the hardware cache on the drive.
Nero auto-magically configured itself to use 71 megs of RAM for a cache.. I've still coastered DVD-Rs.
Read up on the design of DVD+R it is inherently resistant to buffer under run problems. As in if you get an under-run and have to stop recording, you start recording again without wasting a single byte of space. The DVD-R isn't so well designed, but this drive only does 4x DVD-R.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
I've got one of the plextor PX-708a's and have been using it for about a month and a half now. I've been very impressed with this unit for a couple of reasons.
:P
When I purchased it, it was the same price as 4x dvd burner/combo burner drives at the time.
Covered all formats (like a good combo drive should. DVD_+R/RW, CD-R/RW).
Still had a high burn speed for cd's (40x), quite a few of the high speed combo burners I was looking at would only cut a cd at around 24x.
It's offered with a white or black faceplate (I picked black to match the new pc I had just built)
This is the first plextor drive i've owned, usually staying in the yamaha camp. It came with 1-8x DVD+R and my attempts to purchase more at fry's/staples/compusa all failed miserably. Once that one was gone, I started trying to burn 4x rated dvd+r's at 8x and have gone through a couple of 10 packs with no problems. I use this unit in a winxp machine, with Nero Ultra to burn it (I didin't even look at the software that came with it, I think it was a plextor branded app) and have been very happy with it overall.
I started reading this thread and started seeing the usual "But why, 8x is too fast" bla bla bla type stuff, but until we get to the generation 4+ of these devices speed is still going to be the selling point of dvd burners. Remember when the 4x cd burners came out? People were saying they're a waste of money and you don't need something that fast then too. But now, we're at the point where you can pretty much just go and buy a new cd burner without checking the speed and you've still got something screaming fast and rock solid. So stop bitching about device enhancements.
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