Slashdot Mirror
Plextor First With A 12x DVD+R Drive
Tesko writes "It seems the first 12x DVD+R drive has been released by none other than Plextor, with their Model PX-712A (Product link here). The drive's write speed includes, 48X CD-R, 24X CD-RW, 12X DVD+R, 8X DVD-R, 4X DVD+RW, 4X DVD-RW. And it's read speed comes in at 48X CD-ROM/CD-R, and 16X DVD-ROM. Also noteworthy, the drive apparently has a 8MB buffer."
I was just at CompUSA buying a new dvdr drive. Shitheads! [fp?]
Interesting that the DVD-R write speed is lower than +R
Be very, very careful what you put into that head, because you will never, ever get it out. -Thomas Cardinal Wolsey
[I've used other Plextor products and been happy with them.]
No DVD+R DL support?!?! naaa... speed is not an issue if you still got to rip a dvd to copy it...
Remember the good old days when you could list your optical drive specs with only 3 numbers? For example, "I just got a new CD Burner! It's 32x16x8" Now, it's what? 48x12x8x8x8x32x32x48. Just freaking perfect. This is what multiple standards do to us.
Canadian Cynic, canadian politics is less boring than you
At least for CD-R the read speed is the same as the write speed - that's quite cute in my opinion!!
Now if only I had 4GB of something to burn to disc that fast ... For critical files, I'm going to run at low speeds for safety, for less critical stuff I'll probably be on a CD, if for no reason other than media costs.
"Because Science" is one step from "Because old book". Try "Because of my experiment testing my falsifiable assertion".
An 8x burner is pretty fast, so 12x isn't really that big of a deal. This like the 48x burners vs. the 32x burners. We're talking only a couple minutes difference. The next big leap is the dual layer drivers.
Black CD tray minimizes jitter
Can anyone with a bit of know-how explain why the colour of the tray would minimse Jitter?
Are these devices standard? Can i just put it in my box and use it?
European Page sans-flashing.
You'll also note that us lucky non-US customers get a 2-year On-Site collect and return warranty. Woo!
1385KB/s * 12 = 16620KB/s, or in other words: the buffer will empty in half a second if the stream dries up. Good thing we have linking.
(I assume it's zoned so the real numbers will probably be slightly less)
Do not click on link.
That definately will decrease backup time, I mean with dual layer coming out, and if the speeds keep increasing for drives, this could become a viable realtime backup solution, especially using a disc changer. Im not saying it will be blazing, but for smaller companies, it could definately help cut costs. Just seems very cool.
je suis parce que j'aime
I havnt really been following the writable DVDs. Whats up with all these formats? DVD-R +R DVD-+&RW-WR/W!?!
Knowing the data-rates that can be involved with DVDs I would have thought that 8Mb is only maybe a seconds worth of 'incident' time during a write.
As it is, I've already reached a happy medium where I only burn at 12x on my CDR because I know that no matter how shoddy the media I use in the drive is, i've got a 99% chance of a sucessful burn.
I imagine, that if I was to buy a DVD writer I'd end up in the same 'middle-ground' - I don't even know if I can find a use for all this 'speed' when writing sessions are usually relegated to coffee breaks and lunchtimes anyway.
Ripping an new rectum in the fabric of spacetime.
It's all well and good having a drive that can write at 12x but it's still really hard to find 8x DVD's even though I and my friends all have 8x drives.
This is great, now the bootleggers over here will be able to produce more dvds!
(\_/)
(O.o) This is Bunny. Add Bunny to your signature
(> <) to help him achieve world domination.
Blink or no blink. I would buy Plextor in a heartbeat. The only bad thing is that it doesn't come in SCSI, but I'd be more than happy with an external with Firewire. BTW the black minimizes jitter by reducing backscatter. Remember the CD surface is reflective to a certain degree.
I have an 8x Plextor, and the media, when available, is way too expensive. Can you even buy 12x media yet?
Optical storage is for wimps.
Real nerds memorize their data!
How many DVD burners is that the "equivalent" of? ;)
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
12x speed is very nice but this is still a single layer dvd writer. The first of the dual layers will be out in a few weeks. Sony is sceduled to be out the 16th. You can already preorder it. The specs this beast are nice but its dead on the floor. Wait till the dual layer is here then they will be giving them away.
Supporting World Peace Through Nuclear Pacification
There's really 2 standards, + and -.
However:
a) once written, either is usable in any drive
b) All writers these days work with both types
Therefore this issue disappeared about 9 months ago. Try to keep up
This will inevitably drive the price of the other plextor dvd burners(708a, 504a, etc) and subsequently other 8x burners down, i'll take that. Can't beat plextor quality especially when the price will drop a bit. I'll be perfectly happy with a 8x burner.
Around these parts, the only thing bootleggers produce is moonshine! Perhaps you meant to say reproduce (as in make copies)
From excellent karma to terible karma with a single +5 funny post...
" It seems to me that DVD burners this fast would only be used for DVD piracy."
How dumb is this statement?
I have a 250GB HD, and I need to back about 200G of it up.
Each DVD+/-R holds, for the sake of this argument, 5G. That's 40 DVD's to back things up completely. Now then, each DVD at 2.4x takes 1/2 hour, so this is 20 hours to back things up. That means it takes me about 3-4 days since I don't spend every waking hour backing up.
If I can go to a 12 speed drive, then my time drops to a fraction, and I don't have to spend days backing up.
Is this clear now? Will you stop being a fucking shill of the MPAA and imagine other people do things *LEGALLY* that you aren't familiar with?
Seriously.
Double layer support (8.5 GB) is the hot thing to come for DVD's and without this, there is no way this thing will be a success.
Yahh, hiii haaaaa! -Major Kong, from Dr. Strangelove
If it's not Dual Layer, then it's just not cutting edge for the "/." crowd.
Now, if the drive was DL AND 12x DVD+R AND could perform a 34 priority crawl of the internet for Natalie Portman pics AND burn them to media automatically, then, AND ONLY THEN, would it be a "/."-worty article.
Write speeds don't impress me. If they can convert over to SATA interfaces, then I'll be interested in drives like this.
I know some mfr's are trying to get such drives out on the market, but last I heard they're still working out some kinks. Plextor, usually first to market with everything, suprises me by their not having this on new drives.
--
There's no S-ATA, Oh I'll just have to wait.
Compatibility doesn't come easy.
It's a game of sit and wait...
They have a Serial ATA version as well. I'm looking at getting this one now that I'm addicted to SATA. It's super fast and easy to hook up drives, what more coudl you want?
I got my first story on /. !!!
One million *IAA burners. ...What!.. why does nobody tell me these things! ..One billion *IAA burners
It's to bad really. Plextor made the best SCSI drives on the market. Now, they don't make any SCSI drives anymore. In fact, I think Toshiba is the only one that makes a SCSI DVD drive.
Life is not for the lazy.
8Mb is one megabyte
8MB is eight megabytes
The case of the 'b' is very important, although I suppose not as imortant as the "m", as lower case is milli, and upper case is mega.
At 12x write, I guess an 8MB buffer would be data that is exhausted in less than a tenth of a second. It is still useful for keeping things going smoothly because BURNPROOF slows things down a lot when the drive runs out of data. Many drives still have 2MB.
It is a bit of a concern as EAC says it prefers to not have any buffers at all to get the most accurate extraction, so having 4x as much of a buffer might be a problem.
My G4 is writing 2 minute videos to 4xDVD-R's as I write this and it turns out the recent firmware "update" to the Pioneer superdrive means that 4x disks now write at 1x, which makes me realize yet again that I MUST READ THE READ ME's before buying a 50 pack of 4x blank DVD-R media.
Hopefully Apple will start making faster DVD burners standard in their G5's very soon now!
www.nero-online.org has these drives on sale.
I want one... donations anyone?
please mod up
I can go down to my local supermarket and pick up a DVD-R AND a DVD+R in either single of 5-packs. Standard supermarket "people who buy this really have no clue about tech prices" markup applies, but still... I can get one until 12am if I really need to.
I have to agree with my parent though; There's no point buying more space at a lower cost per MB if you're not going to use it.
There are ways to maximize storage, though. Incremental backups on a single CD, until it fills up, for example. I don't personally like that approach since it puts too many eggs in one basket. It also increases the potential for faulty reads on other DVD readers. heck, I still have trouble getting my multi-session CD-R's to read on all of my CD-ROMS!
click-clack, front and back. I'm not moving this car otherwise.
>There's no point buying more space at a lower cost per MB if you're not going to use it.
I don't understand. So just download some more porn to fill it up?
You don't need to worry about it, at least if you have a good drive. New drives have technology that gets called things like SmartLink and BurnProof but what it adds up to is if the datastream is interrrupted and their buffer goes empty, they just wait, then resume burning, no coaster.
these damn posts about some dumb, incremental and not inovative improvement in technology? Was anyone actually surprised that DVD burners have, in fact, increased in speed? Big friggin deal. Unless this DVD burner can make coffee or some crap, i dont see why its on slashdot.
Plextor claims that the drive will write at 12x on its branded 8x media and it's quite possible that it'll do so on other media too if you're lucky.
Each time there's a story about faster processors, bigger harddrives, or more bandwidth, there's a guy like you posting something to the effect of "since I personally don't need something that fast/big, other people don't need it". It's not interesting at all.
Next time make a comment about porn, you'll be modded up.
i'm not the burning guru or anything, but will there be any problems with media compatibility here? has anyone purchased this drive yet to test it out for us?
You will have to wait at least 2 years for a half assed driver to be written
If it has digital restrictions management, what's the point? There's no DVD-Ram random access, so it sucks for data unless you are a fan of tapes, so its only benefit appears to be for music or videos.
/. exposure?
If it has digital restrictions management built in, what's the point of giving this drive
Much of the media out there as DVD+R that says it is 4x media will also burn at 8x. I have the Plextor 708A drive, 8x DVD+R burner, and I buy 4x Memorex media and burn at 8x with no problems. You may want to look at DVDRhelp.com and see what media burns at what. The list covers 25 different media brands and tells exactly how fast they will burn at with what burners, etc.
Alcohol & calculus don't mix. Never drink & derive.
Seeing how every drive in the market is IDE, plextor in theory can once again capture all of the market's SCSI needs. But they haven't released one DVD drive on SCSI. I am amazed.
while submerged in grits.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Guys, this really isn't a new drive. Just check around CDRLabs and CDFreaks, we've known about it and been discussing it for a while, just look at this rather long thread on availibility of the drive:
8 88
http://www.cdrlabs.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=15
Oh yeah? Well I get floppy disks for $0 too, which is the same price, and ergo, just as good as the CDs!
Now I can produce drink coasters even faster!
Do you or your partner snore? - Visit www.snoring.com.au
Not only is Lite-On shipping a $200 12x this month, they have a 16x coming out next month.
Duh, we're geeks, of course we really need all this speed.
When I eventually buy my first DVD writer, it should be incredibly affordable, even on my college budget. I'm thinking 8x will be fast enough for me, and a much cheaper option once 12x or even 16x becomes the standard.
For convenience, does anyone know the current "standard" rate for external DVD writers?
just have a row of chinese children in their basement memorizing the stream of 1's and 0's being displayed on a stock market-esque ticker in front of them!
Okay, Dan, I'm only gonna sing this one more time.
If you want it to be possessive, it's just "ITS." But if it's supposed to be a contraction then it's "IT-APOSTROPHE-S"
...scalawag!
Plextor have always had a pretty good reputation for CD and DVD drives.. my dad bought their 8x drive recently and I was extremely impressed with it. Absolutely rock solid performance, extremely fast for reading (best digital audio extraction I've seen, ever) - and the bundled software is cool too. None of the usual buggy useless bloatware crap you get with most hardware, it's a neat unobtrusive tool that sits in the systray, but lets you tweak all aspects of the drive's performance, and lets you burn audio and data CDs/DVDs, even with Ogg Vorbis support for ripping and burning! (that really suprised me)
:)
So yeah, well done Plextor
Check this review out. Didn't have any more 12X media on hand, but once there are, definitely more benches to come. Overclockers Online PX712A
Since I already got mine, Newegg has a 50 pack of Taiyo Yuden badged as Samsung for $60 shipped. This is the exact stuff I currently use and burn at 8x fine.
Anyone know a place to get an OEM model of this?
I don't buy retail boxed anything. I have no use for and will not pay for the M$ stuff, cables, manuals or pretty box they force you to pay for.. I just want the bare drive for my Linux box...
I was at a computer show in Orlando and I bought a 4x CD-R drive (like 1997). The guy working the booth told me it would never get much faster because the burn couldn't be reliable. How funny... Can't wait to get a 12X DVD-R...will probably wait to get a G5 first though.
Damn you slashdot, for reminding me my order is now 7 days overdue :(
:) The biggest gripe I had with a cheap NEC drive, was the hugeeeeee delay the drive has recognising the drive when a disc is put in.
Still, looks like a quality drive
That wouldn't happen to be a 'Wearnes' drive would it? OMG, that was the suck! Proprietary, sorta-IDE interface, slow as dog crap, burned coasters about 2:1 times.
As I remember, when I got my 2X CD-R, a couple buddies and I ended up STOMPING it to death.
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
As hard as it may be to imagine, not everyone has a need for a DVD drive. I don't even watch DVD movies; why would I need a DVD drive? I guess that my new 2.8 Ghz P4 RAID 0 system is just a decrepit antique with one foot in its computing grave.
Most people don't compile their own OSes or edit video. If you do and you really need massive and fast backup, try a spare hard drive, or better yet, RAID 1 or 5
..,that DVD+R DL and DVD-R DL is coming. Complete with both write and read speeds, I'm sure.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
...that the specs of the DL drives I've seen say DL will go at 2,4x. So you'll be able to burn two single-layer discs in less time than 1 DL disc. I think in something like 18 (2*9) vs 45 minutes.
I'd rather have some hotwswap removable SATA disks though, anyone know where you can get such a thing cheaply in Norway (with some spare trays?) newegg seem to be selling something like the Kingwin KF-72 for nothing apiece, but in Europe they seem to want to rob us. (7$ US = 39E on kingwin.nl, both less VAT...)
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
...don't forget it's the same old doublespeak. 4,7GB = 4,37GiB, 8,5GB = 7,96GiB. Either way it's an 80% increase over current capacity though, which is very nice :).
I wonder how long before we'll see Blue-Ray taking over for DL again. I believe burners are already out in Japan....
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
>|<*:=
Yea, it displays the word "config" against a white background. Parent must be the most informative troll ever in the history of Slashdot.
Apart from it not being dual layer capable, so more or less dead in the water, there is also a 712SA version which has a Serial ATA interface. Finally a
computer that does not need parallel ATA is a reality.
dammit, that's why we have a preview button! That should have read :)
it would appear that something ate my </irony> tag
Real stupidity beats artificial intelligence every time.
-- Terry Pratchett, Hogfather
There was an interesting article in the German c't magazine about error rates in relation to DVD burning speed. They tested various media with various writers, and save for a few very specific drive/media combinations, they found the results to be less than satisfactory when burning at 8x. They voiced their worries about the upcoming 12x burners...
"What do I need a dvd drive on my pc "
To read data backups.
Talk about circular reasoning. I don't use DVD backups because I don't have any DVD backups, so therefore there is no use for DVD backups.
Welcome to 2001. In the future, I heard every PC will have a DVD drive.
"gothed out kids that hang around at EB because they can't find any better friends-" ...no offense, but that happens to be true. As to the DVD, I think you're talking out of your ass. But kids who hang out at EB are kinda pathetic.