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...""

Comments

I dunno but...

[Anonymous Coward]

Most DVD-R's struggle to work reliably at 4x...

Re:I dunno but...

[The_Bad_Bob]

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.

Re:I dunno but...

[littleRedFriend]

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).

Re:I dunno but...

[AKnightCowboy]

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.

That's one of the reasons I've been leery of even buying a DVD-R burner at all. CDs have proved decently reliable, but the technology is over 20 years old. DVDs seem too new to trust my data to. When faced with backing up my PVR's video collection I am torn between trying to back up 4-5 hours per DVD in DivX format or going the more expensive route and buying a decent LTO tape drive. Somebody in the backup business needs to get their heads out of their asses and get a backup medium that can backup our largest hard drives on a single tape or disc while having the media cost less than 10% of the cost of the disk itself. 100GB tapes are easily $80 a piece. I could just buy a spare hard drive for that much!

Re:I dunno but...

[WuphonsReach]

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.

Re:I dunno but...

[Megane]

Good drive, good disks, good burn. Using the Pioneer 2X-RW in my G4 Power Mac, and a Pioneer 4X-RW in an external case, not buying mail-order low-ball-priced spindles, and always doing a disc-at-once burn in Toast, I have only had two DVD-R burns out of more than a hundred that didn't verify. (I always run a verify except sometimes when I'm giving the disc to someone else and don't have the time to verify.) One of those two was because the power went out during the burn.

Plus, unlike CD-Rs, the reflective layer is sandwiched in the middle of two polycarbonate discs, so the discs are much better protected from air and abrasion than CD-Rs are, which should improve long-term reliability

By the way, the original poster didn't even say whether he was burning +R, +RW, -R, or -RW, much less which model of drives were in his duplicator. How do you even know which version to be leery of buying?

When does this quote get old...

[c_oflynn]

Thought this was kinda funny:

from this breakneck speed...

Kinda like when the blazing fast 166 MHz pentiums come out, you know in a year people will be scoffing at 8x DVD speed ;-)

Re:When does this quote get old...

[afidel]

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.

Re:When does this quote get old...

[Jucius Maximus]

"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."

So we say today ;-)

Engineers are always coming up with tricks to 'bend' the Laws of Physics. Why not just add more lasers to the drive so you're burning twice as much data at once without increasing the spin rate? Why not spin those lasers in the opposite direction? (It would be evil to calibrate though.) What prevents companies from inventing discs with stronger polycarbonates in then?

I mean in the past people thought that if the human body travelled at more than 35 mph it would explode. And they thought that you couldn't break the sound barrier either.

Yes, someone will have a good laugh at this thread in the future.

Re:When does this quote get old...

[purrpurrpussy]

Why not spin the disk differently? Instead of spinning it from the middle place a "chain" of metal beads around the outside (and maybe in the middle). This forms part of the motor mechanism - the other part is a circular disc of electro-magnets in the drive itself AND use a stronger disc surface if possible.

Dunno! Just a coupla pence.

speed is not a concern

[Anonymous Coward]

Who cares about speed? When will we see DVD-9 DVDs, so we can backup copies perfectly, isntead of having to resort to "shrinking" them to fit on a DVD-5? Is it even theoretically possible to burn multi-layer on a consumer device?

Re:speed is not a concern

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Advertising

[Anonymous Coward]

The present media won't stand it. I've yet to see a 4X writer, standalone or SuperDrive in a Mac, that will be 100% reliable at 4X. And if it's not the media, it's the writing technology.

This would be a major breakthrough if it works. IF. I'm skeptical.

DVD++R

[gmania]

Actually ...

its DVD+R at 8x and DVD-R at 4x

DVD-Rs go 8x

[Pingular]

I still don't understand removable media such as DVDs. You might be able to burn a DVD at 8x, but you can write to a hard-disk many, many times faster than that, and with removable hard-drives you can carry them around much as you would do with a DVD, at less cost. Does anyone know of any reasons why this technology is any better?

Re:DVD-Rs go 8x

[tomstdenis]

DVD/CD's are generally more resistant to being transported. Recall that hard disks have moving parts inside [hmm: make a harddrive system where you only carry the platters around and the motor/controller stay in the computer? Damn patent that idea!].

CD/DVD's are horribly weak [-8 defense!] against scratches [cost 18HP!, hehehe]. My laptop for instance has a hard time with most scratches where a desktop cdrom usually has no problem. It's a pain in the ass ...

Tom

Re:DVD-Rs go 8x

[PhxBlue]

I would use something like that as a more portable alternative to tape backup. You obviously can't backup whole hard drives that way, but for most home-user stuff, the few gigs that gives you is more then enough.

Re:DVD-Rs go 8x

[Seek_1]

Because its cheaper, especially for archiving.

A 50-disc(50*4.5G = 225G) spindle of DVDrs retails for around $65(Cdn). Buying that same capacity from harddrives will easily set you back at least $200, nevermind having to factor in the cost of a USB 2.0 enclosure for the drive.

There's also the fact that it's much easier to justify redundancy costs with disposable media as opposed to physical drives. (Spending an extra $120 for a redundant drive is quite expensive, whereas spending $30 more to burn everything twice is a little easier on the pocket...

Re:DVD-Rs go 8x

[MrDolby]

"[hmm: make a harddrive system where you only carry the platters around and the motor/controller stay in the computer? Damn patent that idea!]."

Wouldn't that be called a floppy disk.

Re:DVD-Rs go 8x

[RonBurk]

1. price: the cost per GB of DVD-R crossed hard disk prices recently, though they are still very close.
2. durability: DVD is not as susceptible to physical shock and magnetic fields as a hard drive.
3. movability: more PCs can read a DVD-R than have a slot for inserting a removable IDE drive.
4. size: when what you want to store fits fine in 4.7GB, a DVD is a much nicer form factor than an IDE hard drive (so far). (e.g., daily incremental backups extending back for a full month.)
5. movies: I can't create a movie on a hard drive and then stick it in my consumer DVD player (so far).

However, DVD+RW and DVD-RW would certainly be more attractive for general data use if the operating system actually supported them as random access devices. Don't know about *nix, but Windows does not support such access until the next version (XP supports drag and drop, but simply copies files to a temp area, and then waits for you to tell it to do the One Big Burn).

Re:DVD-Rs go 8x

[general_re]

What will you say when you can hook your iPod into your TV and watch movies from it? The parent is dead on: removable media is obsolete and outdated.

So when I want to send my mother a video of her grandson's birthday party, I'll just drop my iPod in the mail for her? Don't think so...

Re:DVD-Rs go 8x

[fiddlesticks]

Because I tried to insert my HD (internal and external, mind you!) into my friend's DVD player

It wouldn't fit, so I got really mad, and hammered it in. It still didn't work.

Then my friend came back from his vacation, and he wasn't happy. So now I'm looking at these DVD-R things.

Re:DVD-Rs go 8x

[AKnightCowboy]

The idea of removable media is archival, not short term as you would use a hard drive for. There will always be a need for long term storage media, and the faster you can get it to disk the more valuable the platform is.

The problem is, how reliable ARE these DVD-R discs? Initial reports seem to say they're getting less than 3-5 years of storage life when stored in a cool place. To me that's not archival, but short term backup. Hard drives last longer than that! I want guarenteed DVD-R archival life of at least 15 years and then I'd consider trusting my data to it. Until then I'll stick with CDs and/or keeping my data on multiple systems for redundancy on spinning magnetic disks.

Re:DVD-Rs go 8x

[unger]

unless your hard drives are part of a RAID array, i'd say they were *less* reliable than DVDs. i've heard the same reports about DVDs _and_ CDs. i've been working on computers for over 20 years. i've never seen one burnt CD go bad.

i've also only purchased the highest quality burners and media. i just purchased my first DVD burner (haven't even installed it yet). a Pioneer DVR-106D. read the reviews, this is considered to be the most reliable DVD burner out there. i still need to finish my research on reliable DVD media. then i'll make the move from CDs to DVDs.

finally, i have seen many HDs stop working. i'd *much* rather have an occasional DVD stop working than have a 300GB hard drive die. don't forget that hard drive manufacturers recently dropped their three year warranties in favor of one year (i know there are still some three year warranties out there). this doesn't make me more confident in hard drives.

reading

[m_c_rose]

I find that unencoding takes much longer than burning. While packet writing with a 2.4x seems to be more than fast enough. With the prices of 4x drives as low as they are geting the price point for 8x just wont be worth it for now.

Sig, You can't handle my Sig

buffer

[iamthemoog]

8x is a pretty damn fast write speed for a 2MB buffer. I know Plextor have introduced a whole bunch of buffer under-run stuff, but I for one would be happier with a bit more. (especially since my hard drive is so horribly fragmented....)

8MB wouldn't (shouldn't?) be out of the question for a top of the line product such as this.

Re:buffer

[pla]

8x is a pretty damn fast write speed for a 2MB buffer.

Agreed... It really surprises me they'd go with a buffer that small. At 8x (just over 11MB/s), the buffer needs to completely refill every 182ms, 5.5 times per second. Considering how often computers seem to "hiccup", just freezing for half a second every now and then, I would not want to trust more expensive 8x media to the odds that one of those random events won't occur during a burn.

Especially considering the price of these drives, does it seem like so much to ask to put in a decent sized buffer? +5 for first to market with the new burning speed, but -100 for lack of forethought about how many coasters people really need around the house.

Re:buffer

[lithron]

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.

Re:buffer

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

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.

In about three months

[Anonymous Coward]

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.)

the slowdown in writing is dirty media

[Selecter]

If you get any fingerprints, scratches, etc on yer disks they are not going to burn anywheres close to the rated drive speed anyways. Most poeple dont get the benefit of higher speed burns becuase they are slobbish :)

Id like to see two ratings for burnable media. Something like 8X when new and clean, 2X when smeared with grape jam and peanut butter or somethin. :D

Plextor's 708A works just fine at 8X

[Jarnis]

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.

Discs

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

DVD-R vs DVD+R

[mm0mm]

is as sticky competition as VHS vs Beta. No matter how fast they are I won't buy a burner until either of them becomes de facto standard. ...oh yeah, I know a lot of burners burn both formats, but it doesn't matter to me. I mean, what happened to DVD-ROM drives nowadays? Does anyone even remember?

DVD players

[yerricde]

You can't connect a removable hard drive to a TV nearly as cheaply as you can put a DVD Video Recordable disc in a DVD player.

Re:Same "in" longer?

[Pupp3tM]

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.

Re:Same "in" longer?

[dirkdidit]

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.

Always the way

[Frodrick]

"It seems that the next speed level for DVD Writers is here."

Of course it is - I just bought a 4x DVD burner yesterday. 8+(

Re:Always the way

[Angram]

He/she is not satisfied with the product. Simple as that. It's not an abuse; the person bought the product believing it was the best offered product in its class, but has found it not to be. Few stores only accept returns on broken items, and many (most?) large chains only ask as a matter of gathering consumer feedback on inventory.

Space not speed, and price issues

[Space cowboy]

Personally I want more space on a DVD. I'm quite happy to wait twice as long if I can store more. In terms of a backup solution

Your typical HD costs 200 pounds for 250GB.
Removeable caddy for HD costs 10 pounds
One-off caddy container for PC is 15 pounds.

A DVD-/+/RW/RAM drive costs 105 pounds.
A DVD-RW holds 4.5GB and costs 17 pounds for 5 (=22.5 GB)
Total cost of 250 GB DVD media is (105+187 =) 292 pounds.

So, the DVD just about scrapes home as cheaper during the third 250 GB. You may be able to get something off if you buy your DVD's in larger bulk - those prices were all I could see offered, and they're the cheap end as well. The "branded" names make the argument even stronger since "Sony" DVD-RW's are 22 pounds, not 17...

On the other hand, you now have 165 DVD's with your data on somewhere. At that rate, it's surely better to have 3 HD's and a caddy slot on your PC ? In an emergency, you can even get by for a day or so using the data live off the disk.

If, however, you want to pirate DVD's and play them in your home cinema, then sure, that extra 7 minutes you'd have to wait over a 4x drive would seem an eternity...

Simon.

Is maximum speed just a matter of marketing?

[ToKsUri]

I've always had the impression that gradually incrementing the speed of CD/DVD writers (and other products) is just a matter of marketing and not of actually beeing posssible to offer the technology.
When CD Writers started going up from 8x, 12x, 16x, 24x, 32x, 40x, 52x.... it seemed ridicolous! I simply thought the 52x technology was already available when the 8x was out in the stores.
I know that increasing the writing speed is probably not just making the CD spin faster.. but then, what else is it?
It looks like as if with the DVD, everything is repeating. Can someone give me a reason why DVD writers are not faster already apart from marketing reasons and companies just wanting us to buy all different speeds? Is it actually impossible to have faster DVD writers at market price right now? or is it a technical impossibility?

As much media development as the drive itself

[pacc]

Here is a story about how laser output, drive speed and media properties is related in getting faster DVD writers:
http://neasia.nikkeibp.com/nea/200311/co nele_27449 0.html

Reliability=dvd-ram

[olddoc]

If you really want reliability go with dvd-ram in a cartridge. There is built in error checking as you write and no software is needed. Just mkfs /dev/hdx and mount and go.
Unfortunatly this format hasn't caught on and the latest LG 4040B drive doesn't support dvd-ram with the protective cartridge. It does do dvd-r +r -rw +rw cd-r and cd-rw. Maximum PC mag states it can write a 4g dvd-ram at 3x in 20 minutes and every bit of your binary file *will* be there.

So, what is the expected data speed limit?

[Overzeetop]

I bought a 4X when they dropped to $125, and am pretty happy with it. I won't spring for a faster drive until I can get a DVD-9.

But to my real question: How fast will they go? Most seem to be married to the 33MHz IDE spec on which all removable media are based. IIRC that's one byte (8bit parallel) at 33MHz...or about 25X (118GB/hr) with the bus completely saturated. So, without moving to IDE100 or IDE133, 20-22X seems to be a limiting factor.

Someone above mentioned that 16X DVD speed has the same rotational velocity as a CD at 48X. Now, since 52X seems to be the CD-R limit based on the likelyhood of media disintegration that would seem to limit the DVDs to about 17X.

I suppose there is the proposition that a two laser DVD-9 could overcome the rotational velocity bottleneck by writing to both layers at once, given that the file layout cooperates. And if writing a DVD-18 becomes a possibility (unlikely), then a four laser system could write all four layers at once. But this requires moving the CD/DVD devices beyond the UltraDMA mode 4 they seem limited to.

So...where will the DVD speed end?

Just remember

[sandbagger]

Hi: When backing up your p()rn, write the date on the disc and transfer it again in under two years. Disc rot on a DVD-ROM is like disc rot on a CD-ROM, only better.

I've got an idea....

[iceT]

instead of making FASTER DVD recorders, how about fixed this whole 'this burner only works with these media'.

For CDRW's, I can get any media and it will work...

But DVD-RW/+RW drives (especially the newer ones) seem to only have a limited number of types of media that work on them...

How 'bout we fix THAT before we go for Speed?

Can anyone get the PX-708A to work with FreeBSD?

[Lester67]

I had to order one (under protest) for our FreeBSD guys, all the while insisting the Pioneer was a better drive.

The Plextor wouldn't work *AT ALL* under BSD. Works like a champ under Windows though.

The Pioneer works like a champ under both.

(Also, is this news? I ordered this thing over a month ago... slow news day at /.?)

Question for those of you who have these things

[retro128]

The write speed of an 8X DVD is about 11MB/sec, right? Does anyone have problems with their hard disks keeping up with that speed, especially when they are doing other stuff in the background?

What is the point of a 2MB buffer on this thing? It would run out in 1/5 of a second....

That's great and everything...

[DroopyStonx]

...but the focus is in the wrong area.

They're wasting time making the 8X DVDs when what we really need are DVD9's.

So I can write a DVD in 9 minutes, great. Nothing is more annoying than trying to copy a movie/game that can't fit on a 4.7GB DVD and being presented with the choice of: "Compress it to fit on one DVD and have it look like ass, or span it across two DVDs"

TDK has an 8x too..

[dday64]

I'm not sure when it was officially 'released', but we got a TDK 8x DVD+/-RW drive in at Staples two weeks ago, it's priced at $250

Have one, no problems with it.

[Psyko]

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.

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) :P

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.

I dunno..I might wait and see...sheez enough

[Ada_Rules]

I am not sure about this whole deterministic computer thing. I mean, I keep hearing a lot about this new quantum computer thing. I am going to keep using paper and pencil until this quantum v.s. deterministic silicon thing plays out... This is just like VHS v.s. Beta. Oh wait..Not sure about the pencil. I hear the pen might win. I think I'll wait on that too. P.S. - Someone please make a slashdot filter that prevents any post that says VHS and Beta from showing up anywhere at any level. The comparison almost never really applies (and in fact it does not really even apply to VHS and Beta the way people think it does). http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/comment/story/0,1 2449,881780,00.html

Firmware upgrades

[bonch]

Not only have they been announced (I've heard dates as early as April 2004), but some burners apparently will only require a firmware upgrade to burn them correctly.

I guess if it's reading DVD9s with its laser, it can burn them too...it just needs to know how.