First 16x DVD+R Recording Tests Available

An anonymous reader submits "CD Freaks.com has made a first preview of 16x DVD recording. Many people wondered if 16x DVD recording would be too fast and data could not be delivered by the hard disk. The first tests show that this is not a real problem. 16x DVD recording means that a DVD disk is written in about 6 minutes . The test drive, a BenQ DW1600, also supports dual layer writing and writing at 16x to 8x media."

Comments

Typo?

[lancomandr]

"The test drive, a BenQ DW1600 also supports dual layer writing and writing to 16x at 8x media."

Last time I checked I couldn't write to 16x itself at any speed of media.

Ahem

[The-Bus]

I've already overclocked my DVD burner. It now burns stuff I haven't even downloaded yet.

Re:Ahem

[DrLZRDMN]

I wonder how hard would it be to do something to that nature by putting in a better motor and tweaking the firmware? There probobly a good reason it wouldn't work having to do with media, anyone know?

Re:Ahem

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder how hard would it be to do something to that nature by putting in a better motor and tweaking the firmware? There probobly a good reason it wouldn't work ... anyone know?

• Tracking (jitter)
• Linearity (timing)
• Laser intensity per unit time

Those three should be enough.

Incase of Slashdot effect.

[BeninOcala]

Preview: BenQ DW1600A Dual layer DVD-Writer Reviewer: OC-Freak Provided by: BenQ Firmware: B5A9 Manufactured: May 2004 We have just seen the first 12x DVD-writers appearing in stores, and here we have it; the first 16X DVD-Writer! Big thanks to BenQ for sending out an early pre-release drive of their upcoming DW1600A DVD-Writer. This is not a finished product yet and the full specifications are just released. So in this short preview we will only take a look at how fast 16x speed is and look at how the writing quality is at 16x. And we will of course answer the question everyone has: Will any 8x DVD+R media work at 16x? Short specifications overview: Writing DVD+R discs: 16x Writing DVD+RW discs: 4x Writing DVD+R Dual Layer discs: 2.4x Writing CD-R discs: 40x Writing CD-RW discs: 24x Reading DVD-Discs: 16x Reading CD-Discs: 40x Access time CD/DVD: 120ms Buffer: 2Mb The specifications seems very good but we would like to see 48x CD-Writing and 48x CD-Reading speeds as some other manufacturers is preparing 16x DVD-Recorders capable of 48x CD-Reading and writing. And at such high writing speeds as 16x we would like to see a larger buffer to keep the dataflow as clean and stable as possible. A buffer of 16Mb would for sure have been at least a little help to keep the dataflow constant and clean. It doesn't support DVD-R/RW either, but BenQ is already preparing new models supporting this. Test machine: For this article we will be using a computer with the following configuration: Hardware: Motherboard:Gigabyte GA-8KNXP with Intel i875P chipset. Processor: Intel Pentium 4 2,8GHz 800MHz FSB with Hyper Threading support. RAM: 1Gb PC3500 DDR GFX: ATI Radeon 9800 pro Sound: SB Audigy 2 Hard disks: 2 x Hitachi Deskstar 7k250 160Gb S-ATA in RAID 0 on the i875P S-ATA RAID controller. Software: Windows XP professional is installed on the computer along with Service Pack 1 for windows XP. We will be using the following software in this review: Ahead Nero Burning ROM version 6.3.1.15 Ahead Nero CD/DVD Speed v3.01 Ahead Nero InfoTool v2.21 K-Probe v2.1.0 What's inside the box? We did only get a white box containing the drive and some media/software: Notice that our drive is a pre-release drive so the bundle is not complete! Here is what we got: The drive itself Sonic software installation CD (RecordNow! 7.10 and DLA 4.90) Intervideo software installation CD (WinDVD creator 2 and WinDVD 4) BenQ software installation CD (BenQ Booktype tool v8.2 and BenQ Q-Video 2.0) Mitsubishi 2.4x Dual layer media Philips 16x DVD+R media Taiyo Yuden 8x DVD+R media CD containing Nero CD-Speed 3.0 Now it's time to take a look at the drive itself: Since this is a pre-release sample the sticker is not finished yet and there is just a generic sticker, plus an extra sticker with some hand written text. Our drive is manufactured May 2004 in Malaysia. On the back of the drive there are from the left: two undocumented pins; digital audio connector; analogue audio connector; pins and jumper to set the drive to cable select, slave or master; IDE connector and power connector. We quickly installed the drive without any problems and here is a screenshot from Nero info tool: Our drive came shipped with firmware B5A9, as we could see it lacks support for reporting C2 error information. And there is no DVD-R/RW writing support. And as usual we may say; we would like to see Mount Rainier support as well as a larger buffer. And another shot from Nero Burning ROM: We do not really find anything alarming here, but Mount Rainier support as well as a larger buffer would have been nice. Let us take a look at the DVD-writing technology used by the BenQ DW1600A: The BenQ DW1600A uses CAV, (Constant Angular Velocity) to write at 16x. The Average speed is 11.32x and total writing time is 6 minutes and 7 seconds. The average speed is lower and the writing time is higher than it could have b

Re:Incase of Slashdot effect.

[Crazy_MYKL]

Linebreaks must be in short supply.

*ducks*

Re:Incase of Slashdot effect.

[ikkonoishi]

In case of Karma Whore Effect mod parent down -1 Overrated.

God damnit

[lancomandr]

He fixed it right after I posted. I feel the flames licking at my feet already :/

Yes, but....

[ikkonoishi]

I doubt I could play UT while burning to a DVD at 16x.

You would need basically a dedicated machine for DVD burning at that speed.

Re:Yes, but....

[damiangerous]

Or you could, you know, maybe stop playing UT for the six minutes it takes to burn a DVD at that speed.

Re:Yes, but....

[Crazy_MYKL]

Blasphemy!

Re:Yes, but....

[kfg]

Good Lord man! The average person will pass out after only two minutes of not playing UT and it takes years of training to go as long as five.

Expecting the average Joe to stop for six is simply absurd.

KFG

Re:Yes, but....

[Anonymous Coward]

you didnt play ut a lot , it shows

Re:Yes, but....

[WiPEOUT]

... or a box with either a SCSI drive or dual CPUs ... or one of the upcoming dual-core CPUs and/or the next generation of SATA which should support command queueing and re-ordering.

Re:Yes, but....

[anethema]

I am not sure where they got the 7 minute figure. It takes me 7ish mins to burn a dvd with 8x.

Maybe they are talking about dual layer. which would make sense if not for the fact that it cannot write dual layer discs at 16x...only 2.4x infact.

Either way...22mb/sec should be reachable by anyone with a hdd made wihtin the last few years. Most hdds can do over 40mb/sec sustainable (sequential read, which a dvd is), so only taking half that should not be a problem.

Could they confuse you anymore...

[bdigit]

The opening sentence...

"We have just seen the first 12x DVD-writers appearing in stores, and here we have it; the first 16X DVD-Writer!"

All those dashes confuse the hell out of me when we have DVD media that is referred to by DVD+R or DVD-R. I had to re-read to make sure they were really talking about DVD+R and not DVD-R.

Re:Could they confuse you anymore...

[Perianwyr Stormcrow]

That mostly has to do with the DVD+ folks wanting to evade licensing fees levied by the DVD- folks. Wheeeeee.

Good for them

[huber]

they had an SATA raid 0 array. What about us people whos boxen still only has a single ata 100 or 133?

Re:Good for them

[Anonymous Coward]

what is a "boxen"?

Re:Good for them

[_generica]

/bok'sn/ pl.n. [very common; by analogy with VAXen]
Fanciful plural of box often encountered in the phrase `Unix boxen', used to describe commodity Unix hardware. The connotation is that any two Unix boxen are interchangeable.

ph34r

Re:Good for them

[Anonymous Coward]

Some stupid word geeks made up. It means "boxes". It also means "I'm fucking retarded".

Re:Good for them

[forkazoo]

Well, first off, "boxen have" .. "a box has." But, I'm not a grammar nazi. :)

Only ATA 133? I work at a computer store, and I get plenty of people with PII's and low spec PIII's coming in all the time who want to make DVD's. The salesman five years ago told them that the computer was very fast, so they typically accuse me of being just a damned liar when I tell them it may not work very well. Oh, and most home users have HP Pavillions and E-Machines and shit like that. You ever benchmark the drives in the super-cheap consumer systems? The drive diagnostic program we use at the shop can usually get ~5 MB/sec out of an E-machines. That's going to RAM, not another drive.

A lot of people won't be able to use the 16 X features of this drive. OTOH, it probably has a larger buffer than a cheap 2.4x drive, so it will probably burn better at 1x than the old drives.

Re:Good for them

[Anonymous Coward]

It's an abbreviation for "bogus oxen," a popular hybrid animal known for transporting large quantities of goods. Geeks tend to tolerate this capability despite the offencive smell of the ox.

Re:Good for them

[Bios_Hakr]

Look at the peak transfer rate of your device and decide if it can keep up with a 16x drive.

I have a single SATA 10k Raptor. It sustains between 40MB/s and 55MB/s depending on which tool I'm using to check. The slowest part of the drive still sustains 35MB/s.

Most ATA100/133 hard drives sustain 25MB/s to 40MB/s. Even my external enclosure can sustain 20MB/s.

I have used SATA and ATA RAID0 in the past. I'm not really impressed with it. The benchmarks show a doubling of transfer, but load times (esp in BF1942) only drop by about 10%.

Re:Good for them

[eht]

It's retard for plural of box.

Re:Good for them

[karnal]

I've found that while Raid0 can be nice to show off a benchmark, these so called Raid controllers on motherboards these days are kinda quirky.

Back when Yuri's Revenge was out (command & conquer series), when I played on my machine with the onboard raid controller enabled (for all drives in the system), the game would actually hiccup. I found out that this was from the "software raid" driver eating up CPU that would normally go to the game.

As well, when you do Raid0, if you don't have identical disks (meaning same manufacturer, same # of platters etc), then you also run into the problem of increased seek times. Why? Well, one disk may get to the needed sector in say 9ms. The other disk, though, since it's of different drive geometry, takes 13ms. Every seek will take as long as the longest drive, actually making the setup feel slower.

I haven't tested any true "hardware" ide raid solutions - I'd assume they are better, especially when using the same disks.

Re:Good for them

[Profane MuthaFucka]

It's what Mike Tyson does. If he's had dinner before the fight.

Re:Good for them

[Doppler00]

The benchmarks show a doubling of transfer, but load times (esp in BF1942) only drop by about 10%.

Then obviously, BF1942 loading maps is CPU or memory bound, not disk bound.

Hmm... since you mentioned that, maybe I shouldn't spend the money on a two drive 10,000RPM SATA RAID0 array...

Re:Good for them

[Anonymous Coward]

windows xp - no version of windows for that matter - does NOT SUPPORT SATA, so it really doesn't make a difference if the drive and the mobo are SATA

Re:Good for them

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows (yes even XP) does not support SATA so even if the hdd and the mobo support it it won't make a difference

Re:Good for them

[Anonymous Coward]

Caller: My computer has a problem, it's not working right.

Me: OK, well what kind of computer is it?

Caller: It's an HP Pavillion.

Me: ... and speed, specs, etc?

Caller: It's a Pavillion.

Me: Can you be more specific? There are hundreds of different Pavillions.

Caller: It's a Pavillion.

Me(to self): There goes my call count... sigh.

HP has done well at making people think Pavillion is some kind of high status brandname.

I always thought a pavillion was one of those little buildings at the fairgounds where they show off the prize swine and goats and whatnot.

Re:Good for them

[Pooua]

I am typing this on a computer whose boot drive is a 120-Gig Western Digital SATA drive, with a boot OS of Windows XP. This same computer also has a 250-Gig Maxtor SATA drive and a 60-Gig WD parallel drive. My motherboard is a FIC AU13.

In what way do you imagine that Windows XP does not support SATA? The only limitation that I have found is that I had to use a floppy disk with the RAID drivers on it to install Windows to the SATA drive. However, I now boot directly from the SATA drive into Windows XP.

Re:Good for them

[Anonymous Coward]

it comes from German, where -en is the most common plural ending.

Re:Good for them

[anethema]

Where to these misinformed people come out of the woodwork ?

Windows XP loads my silicon image driver right from it database, no disk needed. (tho i have sp1)

The only time windows doesnt support sata is on install. Then you have to put in the driver floppy and load the drivers yourself at the beginning of the install process (right when you boot from the xp cd.)

The alternative for people who, like me, dont own a floppy drive and maybe havent had one for years (also like me:) is to slipstream the drivers (plus any service packs and critical updates they want) into the windows xp installation.

Instructions on how to do that are here

Or, a better solution, created by the same person as the site above, is to use his program (its actually just an elaborate batch file that calls certain programs) which creates the entire structure for you if you provide the updates and drivers, and burns you a new bootable xp cd. (given the old one of course). This is what i use for my raid0 setup with silicon image 3112r chip.

Site here

Re:Good for them

[Glenda Slagg]

A better analogy would perhaps be "Oxen", plural of Ox. One of the few nouns in the English language still to use -en not -es to form a plural. This is obviously the way it is done in German to this day and shows the teutonic foundations of the English language.

Re:Good for them

[FictionPimp]

I'll make a bet with you. You buy the hardware, pay for travel, and I'll come out and install a sata drive and install windows on it using a single cd. Say 500.00 + travel costs?

Re:Good for them

[Anonymous Coward]

Like hell. Boxen means boxing in German. The word for boxes in german ends with -eln.

Re:Good for them

[drinkypoo]

It's more like what Mike Tyson does if he has a date...

Re:Good for them

[Anonymous Coward]

"...But, I'm not a grammar nazi..."

If you were, you would have nailed the poster for the use of " whos " instead of " whose " .

Yeah, I aint got nothin better todo than me bein' a grammer nazi . Fer sher.

Re:Good for them

[Anonymous Coward]

Much like 'ph34r' is retard for 'fear', I guess...

Re:Good for them

[timeOday]

Is DVD writing still a real-time task? It shouldn't be. You don't worry about a disk drive or a flash drive getting corrupted just because you don't supply data to it as fast as it can write. I thought most CD writers now had "burn proof" and other similar buzzwords for the ability to recover from an underflow, in effect writing at whatever speed the computer can provide the data.

(I'm not asserting that current DVD drives ARE tolerant of this, just that if they aren't, they should get to work on it).

Re:Good for them

[WuphonsReach]

Is DVD writing still a real-time task? It shouldn't be. You don't worry about a disk drive or a flash drive getting corrupted just because you don't supply data to it as fast as it can write. I thought most CD writers now had "burn proof" and other similar buzzwords for the ability to recover from an underflow, in effect writing at whatever speed the computer can provide the data.

The DVD-writer that I have does have burn-proof, or whatever the marketing term is.

However, anytime that buffer runs dry and the burn-proof kicks in, I've found the disc to become problematic quickly. As in, losing data.

So while, you might technically manage to burn that DVD with running the buffer dry a few times during the session, I wouldn't hold much hope that you'll be able to read data off of that DVD in a few months.

Lessons learned are either that I've had a bit of bad luck, the burn-proof tech in my drive is sub-standard, or that the entire concept of burn-proof is merely a band-aid approach.

Re:Good for them

[Anonymous Coward]

You forgot about "boxes" instead of "boxen".

boxes - brings to mind many boxes.

boxen - conjures up a strange new doctor doolitlish creature that's a mixe between some an ox and some other bovine for me.

Re:Good for them

[Sumocide]

I got me a Hitachi/IBM 7k250 160GB 8MB cache PATA drive. Sustained read at 50 MB/s. Nothing special these days, really.

Re:Good for them

[Anonymous Coward]

The motherboard i have atm has a ATA133 / SATA raid, which enables me to raid between my old drives and my new ones. Right now, though, i only have a single SATA drive in my box, and windows found it and installed on it without any problems( freebsd did that too).

ASUS p4p800-deluxe is my friend.

Re:Good for them

[forkazoo]

Now, the blend between cows and oxen are called coxen. Everybody knows that.

Re:Good for them

[FyreWyr]

Actually it would seem that RAID is the only disk advantage. Hitachi is one of the SATA manufacturers that use the Marvel bridge to convert parallel ATA signals to serial, and the bridge can only communicate as fast as the controller allows, so it's probably back to ATA-133. If you look at Intel's info, it's more likely Ultra ATA 100 (PDF). (ATA Bridge) Native SATA throughout, controller and drives, is almost as expensive as SCSI; smart buying with this in mind are likely to benefit you if you discover you need that throughput to burn these monsters.

Re:Good for them

[eht]

Great, in addition to the retards that say boxen, we also have the retards that moderate my parent post as funny and/or informative.

8x vs 16x

[Coneasfast]

what is the real difference between 16x discs and 8x discs? what physically makes it writeable at one speed but not another? i've wondered about this for CD's too.

is it just a marketing thing or what?

Re:8x vs 16x

[Crazy_MYKL]

It's mostly marketing, those are rated speeds, so if you burn above those and bad things happen, the company isn't responsible. But it SHOULD work with lower rated discs.

Re:8x vs 16x

[DrLZRDMN]

sometimes, spining a cd to fast will warp the disk causeing an uneven burn or even break it so if the increase the speed sturdier disks have to be made, but I think for only double the spead it shouldn't affect it to much.

Re:8x vs 16x

[wo1verin3]

Actually there is a little more then that when it comes to CD-RW (most) and DVD discs. Drives actually detect what speed the media is rated at, so if you have a 1x DVD-R disc, you can only write to it at 1x, other speed options will be unavailable.

Re:8x vs 16x

[Laebshade]

The difference, though I am not an expert by any means, between 8x and 16x dvd+r (or 32x and 48x cdrs) is the guaranteed labeled quality. You are guaranteed by the company who makes the medium that it is capable of being burned and read at said speed.

That doesn't mean it can't be written at higher than said guaranteed rate; on the contrary, I have cdrs that are guaranteed to write/read up to 48x, but I write all of them at 52x.

Re:8x vs 16x

[Pooua]

As I understand it, the main difference in writing speeds between various types of optical media is the dye formulation used in the media.

"To achieve 2.4x high-speed writing, Verbatim DVD+R utilises a patented Metal Azo dye as the recording layer."

Verbatim: Verbatim Announces 4.7GB DVD+R Discs

farkin tops

[Anonymous Coward]

I can backup my Tebibytes of pr0n in no time at all!!

Do DVDs work like CDs

[foidulus]

in that if you burn at a faster rate than a different reader can read, the DVD cannot be read. I know a while back when I had a blazing 2x cd ROM, my friend burned me something on a 4x, but alas, I couldn't read it. Needless to say I was pissed...
DVDs probably work the same way, in which case, the faster burn may only be so useful, but I am probably wrong on that.

Re:Do DVDs work like CDs

[ahaning]

Heh. Things have progressed a bit since the 2x CD-R days. What probably happened was that your drive just wasn't able to distinguish the pits in the CD your friend burned.

I have an older (5-6 years old) laptop whose CD-ROM drive can't read all the discs I burn. It can read most any silver that I give it, though. I'm guessing it's just that the laser isn't able to "see" the pits my CDRW burns (it's an 8x4x32, so it's rather old, too.)

BTW, if you burn audio discs at 16x, do they play at that speed? ;-)

Re:Do DVDs work like CDs

[Anonymous Coward]

The same is still true. I cannot install from any linux iso burnt with anything more than 8x on a dell machine.

Re:Do DVDs work like CDs

[noda132]

in that if you burn at a faster rate than a different reader can read, the DVD cannot be read. I know a while back when I had a blazing 2x cd ROM, my friend burned me something on a 4x, but alas, I couldn't read it. Needless to say I was pissed...

No, and CDs don't work like that either. The situation you describe was an isolated incident. Even a 1x DVD reader (e.g., a DVD player) can read a 16x-burned CD. In fact, there should be no physical difference between a DVD burned at 1x and one burned at 16x.

Re:Do DVDs work like CDs

[ameoba]

Are you sure the 2x drive couldn't read CDs burned at 4x or could it just not read anything written to a burned CD?

Very important distinction to make.

Re:Do DVDs work like CDs

[DeepDarkSky]

This reminds me of an old joke about a dim-witted family where the mom writes a letter to the son: "I am writing this slowly because I know you can't read fast."

Re:Do DVDs work like CDs

[foidulus]

It read 2x burned cds, it was probably just a shitty cd reader.

Re:Do DVDs work like CDs

[Anonymous Coward]

Based on casual observation of disks I've burned, the problem with older drives not reading recently burned disks seems to have more to do with the media than the speed they were burned at. Newer drives will read and burn to media that older drives (both computer and audio deck) may have problems with. My old (15+ years) Onkyo CD player sometimes has problems reading CD-Rs (although I've never had a problem with Verbatim media), that the newer Pioneer DVD deck has no problems with.

Re:Do DVDs work like CDs

[Anonymous Coward]

CD-ROM drives up to around 4x, depending on the model, can't read CD-Rs and CD-RWs. Recordable discs reflect less light than pressed ones, and the older drives did not have lenses sensitive enough to read the lower light levels. It's a well known problem.

Re:Do DVDs work like CDs

[Kernel Kurtz]

I usually recommend to try and match the burn speed with the rating of the disc.

CDR manufacturers spend a lot of effort optimizing the dyes on their blanks for certain speed ranges, (doubling the speed means you have to have the laser burn a normal pit in the dye in half the time). CDRs do power calibration to try and account for this, but it is a pretty imperfect science.

Using 24x rated media at 48x will probably cause problems, as the pits will be less defined. Using 48x rated media at 24x is better but still less than ideal.

This especially shows in devices like car cd players, portable devices, consoles, which are sensitive to the reflectivity and laser/pickup's ability.

Trial and error is still often needed.

Re:Do DVDs work like CDs

[builderbob_nz]

What probably happened was that your drive just wasn't able to distinguish the pits in the CD your friend burned

Last time I looked (not that I can see things that small) CDRW drives didn't put any pits into your disk. All they did was change the colour of the dye to make the laser reflect (refract?) differently.

Re:Do DVDs work like CDs

[ahaning]

Well, yeah, the changed color (meh, colour) is the pits in the disc. If the colour was important, then the drives would have to be made to handle the dark blue discs, the "silver" CD-Rs, the aluminum pressed CDs, etc.

Look up how CDs work. Writeable optical media works similarly, but the dye is burned away in order to create a pit.

Now, I'm not exactly clear on how rewriteable optical media works, but supposedly, it's possible for the laser to make a pit in the dye and then to "unburn" the pit in the dye. Someone else can clear this up, I'm sure.

Re:Do DVDs work like CDs

[jwhyche]

You can see this in modern cd players too. I have a 2001 mit. with the factory cd player in it. I can burn a cd at 16x and it will play fine. But the same player will not play a cd burned from the same batch of blanks, burned in the same writer, with the same software if that cd is burned at 48x.

Re:Do DVDs work like CDs

[builderbob_nz]

Now, I'm not exactly clear on how rewriteable optical media works

Like I said it doesn't burn a pit into the disk, it changes the colour of the die in such a way that it effects the path of the laser.

Re:Do DVDs work like CDs

[ahaning]

http://computer.howstuffworks.com/question287.htm

According to HSW, the laser changes the reflectivity of the dye layer, which I would think of as being different from changing the color.

Maybe we're both thinking the same thing, but just getting mixed up in the terms.

Re:Do DVDs work like CDs

[boisepunk]

glorious jihad
allah will crush his enemies
all praises to him
crap post

amen

The need for speed

[Slayer_X]

Man, wait some months and u can obtain the uber DVD-burner at XX mega-hyper-speed.

Is really a need to have the last toy in hardware?

Don't waste your money :-D

"saludos"

Re:The need for speed

[FlipmodePlaya]

I jumped on the CDR bandwagon a bit early, and god burned by it. The drive I bought ruined discs far too often, in the days where they weren't $.20 a piece. Yet there was no hope for a return, because that was the 'nature of CD burning'. I won't make the same mistake with DVD burners, I advise all to wait a year or two.

Re:The need for speed

[PhoenixFlare]

Why this is insightful, I don't know.

Is really a need to have the last toy in hardware?

If one has the money to aquire whatever the "last toy in hardware" is at the moment without (much) negative impact to the rest of their life, then yes.

If you don't want the latest and greatest, then leave it alone. More power to ya. Hell, it's fine even if you just want to pretend you don't want it, to (as I suspect here) feel superior to those that think advances like this are neato.

I don't think anything like that really gives you the right to tell other people how to spend their money, though :)

Re:The need for speed

[mblase]

I jumped on the CDR bandwagon a bit early, and god burned by it.

Perhaps if you hadn't been stealing music or archiving pr0n, God wouldn't have felt it necessary to smite you with fire for your actions.

Re:The need for speed

[WiPEOUT]

Note to mods: the above should have been moderated Interesting, not Insightful.

His historical anecdote about problems with CD-R devices at a time when there was little mainstream laser-recording manufacturing has little relevance today. In those days, a CD-R drive cost US$1,000, attempted to write at 150KB/s and burned coasters if you sneezed, the wind changed, or the CD fairy decided to have fun.

Today, DVD+/-R/RW drives have been around for years, and you can get a top-of-the-line drive for US$80 that writes to quality media of all four major formats reliably at 10,400KB/s.

Dual-layer burning may yet only be on the horizon, but that's not necessarily any reason to say that existing single-layer 4.7GB media aren't great value for money.

Re:The need for speed

[Anonymous Coward]

I worked for a company that bought one of the very early CD-R drives. We worked with GIS data and relatively large (at the time) databases of measurement data, and being able to burn CDs was a wonderful thing. On a 90 MHz Pentium (I believe the fastest machine at the time) with all SCSI hardware, doing nothing but burning a disc (not even moving the mouse!), about 1/3 of our discs ended up as coasters due to buffer underruns. It was still worth it, because our only other options were boxes and boxes of floppies, or tapes which required bringing the tape drive with you.

Re:The need for speed

[Anonymous Coward]

While you do your waiting, I've been burning DVDs for months now and have never ever had a disk that wouldn't play.

Re:The need for speed

[Hurricane78]

I'm sorry, but ther never will be a DVD-borner faster than 16x. Ever noticed that there were DVD-readers out anno 2000, that could read 16x (i own such a drive [pioneer]). And nowadays we still have the same speed. That's because the dvd-spec has this limitation. Above 16x, the material the tisc is amde of will simply break apart and destroy your drive... So we only can wait for a standard with higher data density, or a super-hyper-stable indestructible material. *missing the good old 8"-drives* ;)

Re:The need for speed

[The 13th Duke]

and god burned by it
Because you had one before God? Now that's what I call being a first-adopter.

Re:The need for speed

[pboulang]

and god burned by it Because you had one before God?
Now that's what I call being a first-adopter.

Exactly. He's saying that he is God's IT director and God would come over on the weekends to borrow his burner.

Obligatory OT: 668 = neighbor of the beast.

Finally...

[Anonymous Coward]

My porn backups will be able to keep up with my downloads...

Re:Finally...

[Anonymous Coward]

my porn d/ls dont keep up with me, at least I know I have this trusty backup now though :-P
anonymous post now.....

The Best Part?

[wandernotlost]

At the end of the page:

"It is not possible to react on this item."

Napkin math calculations (16X speed)

[(1337) God]

DVD: 4.7 GB / 6 minutes = 0.78 GB / minute burnt to disc
CD-R: 650 MB / 6 minutes = 108.33 MB / minute = 0.11 GB / minute burnt to disc

It's clear here that DVD is definitely the way to go if you want good storage size backed up quickly.

CD-Rs are still best for compatibility's sake (every CPU has a CD drive these days, but not all have DVD drives/software) though, and also for car stereo players.

Re:Napkin math calculations (16X speed)

[Anonymous Coward]

Also, consider price. DVDs still come out on top though because they've gotten cheaper.

Interesting numbers.

Re:Napkin math calculations (16X speed)

[Anonymous Coward]

How was this modded to -1 so quick? Are you an established troll or something? I thought the comment was rather interesting.

Re:Napkin math calculations (16X speed)

[Anonymous Coward]

And he's got not only the best Slashdot username, but also the best Slashdot ID.

Wow.

I bow before my lord.

Re:Napkin math calculations (16X speed)

[ChipMonk]

That's an entire CD's worth of data to the DVD in 50 seconds.

Holy crap.

Re:Napkin math calculations (16X speed)

[Anonymous Coward]

Every CPU has a CD? WTF? Who are these people on Slashdot these days? Where did the nerds go?
I was checking out a Mac story the other day and I didn't want to diss the poor guy, but he was straight out of AOL-land with the LOL and talking about "learning to code" meaning learning how to write a link in HTML. I wanted to give him hell, but I felt sorry for the poor critter.

tu3girl

[Anonymous Coward]

= 1400 NetBSD was in the tea I both belIeved that

Hello, im an anonymous poster

[Anonymous Coward]

This product sucks buy JBoss products. I am not from JBoss.

Re:Hello, im an anonymous poster

[Anonymous Coward]

Ahahaha. That's actually pretty funny.

Data from HD no problem.... With Raid 0

[CtrlPhreak]

Come on guys, not everyone has raid with two fast drives, last I'd checked a lot of consumer pcs still ship with 5400 drives. This bottleneck may indeed be a problem with burning 16x dvds on the average system.

Re:Data from HD no problem.... With Raid 0

[ameoba]

The average consumer isn't going to go put a top-of-the-line not-yet-available-to-consumers DVD burner in their system.

Just because the average consumer can't use something doesn't mean there's no market for it. It that was the case the 2TB FC SCSI RAID behind me wouldn't exist.

Re:Data from HD no problem.... With Raid 0

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah but using RIAA math, the amount of people doing illegel burning has just doubled.

Re:Data from HD no problem.... With Raid 0

[Jeff DeMaagd]

The people that have 5400RPM drives likely won't be buying 16x DVD writer drives for a while yet.

Re:Data from HD no problem.... With Raid 0

[julesh]

I noticed a move to 7200 as the base in my local retail outlets about 3 months ago. You now can't get small 5400rpm drives (i.e. less than 60Gb), because the retailers decided the price difference (about GBP 5-10) made it pointless stocking them.

As an aside, with my server's onboard ATA33 interface, I've hardly noticed a difference. I'm not sure if the problem's with ATA33 or the ancient implementation of it used in my motherboard (can't remember when I acquired it, but I know it was one of the first to support UDMA).

Re:Data from HD no problem.... With Raid 0

[jandrese]

It's actually a little annoying that 5400 RPM drives are getting so hard to find. I was building a low cost fileserver with 10 drives and went with the 5400 RPM for power and heat reasons, but they ended up costing a bit more the 7200s of the same size.

OT: Free Orkut invites

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone who wants to join Orkut, but hasn't gotten an invite, please post your (spam-mangled) email address, and you'll get an invite. They do take awhile though (I've sent two out so far, and only one has appeared, so give it time). So go ahead, post away.

Just make it obvious how to demangle your email address. They also want your first and last names, you can give me real ones, or I'll just fill them in with something fake (you can change it later).

Re:OT: Free Orkut invites

[wo1verin3]

Well I'm not interested, but I know someone that will need some friends...

darl.mcbride@sco.com

Physical limits of the medium a factor.

[cascino]

With CDs having reached (essentially) the physical limits of the media at 52x burning speed - it is my understanding the discs will destruct at higher RPM's - has the speed of DVD burning neared its physical limit as well?
A quick back-of-the-envelope calculation tells me that DVDs shouldn't be burnable much faster than 16x... does anyone know anything more about this? Maybe DVDs are more durable than CDs?

Re:Physical limits of the medium a factor.

[kylemonger]

If you can't spin a disk any faster then you do the other thing, add more heads, i.e. a second or third laser writing the disk at the same time.

Re:Physical limits of the medium a factor.

[Pooua]

Drive heads are relatively expensive, and the advantage gained decreases at an exponential rate. I would estimate that the optimum advantage in terms of speed would be gained with 3 drive heads. Additional drive heads would only provide a small increase in access speed.

Re:Physical limits of the medium a factor.

[Anonymous Coward]

Umm, I am sure I am not the only one to have the idea of burning to the media with more than one laser. Think 2 lasers, twice as fast, 104x write? Three lasers, 156x? I don't think the medium has reached it's physical WRITE limit, it has reached it RPM limit. No?

Re:Physical limits of the medium a factor.

[Anonymous Coward]

Okay dip shit, he isn't saying he is looking for an increase in access time. He is saying that you can write twice as fast with two lasers (or 3 times as fast with 3, 4 with 4, etc etc.) And to say that it is more expensive is obvious. "Oh you want a Viper instead of a Focus? That's going to cost you more." DUH!

Hi, i've used this product

[Anonymous Coward]

And it's shit compared to anything from JBoss. Their products are far superior. By the way, I have nothing to do with JBoss. Im an anonymous user. Buy JBoss.

Ewww, BenQ

[Dark Lord Seth]

Horrible 'brand'. Once worked in a computer store for a while. We sold about 20 of their TFTs before we figured out that the three we had on display were showing serious signs of wear. After being on display for just two months. That, coupled with the two we already sent back for replacement, ( One simply didn't work, another one auto-adjusted the screen about 15cm too far to the right. ) make me glad I wasn't working there anymore when all those BenQ monitors started to fail on our customers.

Anyways, let BenQ take the brunt of a new tech. If I'd want a 16x dvd+-rw drive so badly, I'd wait for very good quality ( Plextor ) or a good medium between quality and price. ( NEC ) And yes, those of you who are interested can take that as a hint.

Re:Ewww, BenQ

[ameoba]

I doubt BenQ actually makes any of their own hardware; they probably just buy parts from some Taiwanese company nobody's ever heard of and put it into a BenQ box.

Re:Ewww, BenQ

[shepd]

BenQ is/was Acer. The proud manufacturers of old Apple laptops.

Let me just put it this way: Budget prices, budget brand, budget use. >:-D

We bought a couple of hundred 56i Acer monitors for labs at my old college. I do believe the failure rate approached 99%. In the end, a special deal was made so that the wholesaler could work on the warranty situation. All in all, it kept me busy! :-D

Re:Ewww, BenQ

[Anonymous Coward]

> they probably just buy parts from some Taiwanese company nobody's ever heard

They ARE a Taiwanese company (that until not too long ago nobody's ever heard of).

Re:Ewww, BenQ

[number]

I must admit I'm a tad skeptical of BenQ's manufacturing quality, but on one occasion they have come through for me.

Right now I'm reading this post back on a 15" BenQ FP557s LCD monitor I bought for $145 refurbished - no dead pixels, still running like a champ after 8 or so months (cheapest search now shows it going for ~$280). Sure it was a gamble buying a refurbed LCD without seeing it first, but it sure paid off for me!

Re:Ewww, BenQ

[FRiC]

BenQ was split off from Acer, but they're completely different companies. The Acer group also includes AOpen, Apacer, etc.

BenQ was trying to take over Acer a few months ago...

Re:Ewww, BenQ

[taxevader]

I'll have to agree there. I bought a BenQ 4x DVD+ burner, and I've had nothing but trouble with it from the get go. Even on brand name DVD+Rs, it often refuses to read what it burned just minutes ago. Other machines (even first-gen DVD-ROMs) can read them flawlessly. Add to that the fact that it totally stopped reading/writing CD's/CDR's after two months... nothing but headaches.

Next time I'll plonk out the few hundred extra yuan and get myself a decent device.

Re:Ewww, BenQ

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree computer lab I worked in had about 60 machines, 45 were BENQ and 45 had to have the CD-RW drives swapped out for new ones. Same happened to those so we replaced the lot with other brand drives.

That included a load of old ones from old PC's which are still going and pioneer and plextor etc.

(Whatever was going cheap that week, I was told)

Re:Ewww, BenQ

[JCholewa]

> Horrible 'brand'. Once worked in a computer store for a while.
> We sold about 20 of their TFTs before we figured out

If it helps, I have at least a little experience with their actual optical writing products, which are what this conversation is about. I have their DVD+RW product (400A or something), and it's pretty fantastic. No coasters on either DVD+R or CD-R writes, and my only failure was when I accidentally bought a pack of 50 DVD-R media, and it didn't burn because it wasn't DVD+R. But I had bought it on the cheap (under half a dollar per disc), so it didn't really hurt to donate it to the local LUG.

--
-JC
http://www.jc-news.com/coding/freedom/

Storage.

[Raven42rac]

A little off topic, but does anyone remember thinking that one floppy was "a lot of data"? Then 1 CD? Now 1 DVD?
I don't flinch when I back up my files to 2 DVDs and 1 CD. (No pr0n either)

Re:Storage.

[Hes Nikke]

does anyone remember thinking that one floppy was "a lot of data"? Then 1 CD? Now 1 DVD?
I don't flinch when I back up my files to 2 DVDs and 1 CD.
yes, yes, no.

i remember having a double sided 5.25" floppy disk all to myself, and i never filled the 1st side! then i got a mac with a 20 Megabyte Hard drive. i was in heaven.

later i had a new mac with a whopping 120 Megabyte hard drive. this machine also had a bay for a CD-ROM! Well i won a copy of Myst so i had to get the CD-ROM drive to play it :) 750 Megabyte was amazing! and to be able to *write* that (i did it at school a coupled years later) as just mind boggling.

By the time 4.7 gigabyte writable DVD's came out we were already working with 30 or 40 gigabyte hard drives. by the time i got one, i already had a 120 gigabyte hard drive in my computer, so it wasn't that big of a deal, it was nice to be able to burn that much data in one go, but it was evolutionary rather than revolutionary.

Re:Storage.

[Hes Nikke]

750 Megabyte was amazing
especially considering that the biggest discs at the time were 650 MB! (read "D'oh!")

Re:Storage.

[JCholewa]

> 750 Megabyte was amazing
> especially considering that the biggest discs at the
> time were 650 MB! (read "D'oh!")

For what it's worth, a "650MB" CD actually does have a capacity of around 750MB. The CD-ROM standard apparently allows for a lot of error-correcting redundancy, since songs and video originally put onto the media did not have built-in error correction, and since the media itself was prone to scratches and such.

The XCD spec was pretty cool. It just filled all the sectors fully and relied on software error correction (the kind that you find in modern movie formats). So you could burn something like 804MB to a 700MB CD-R.

--
-JC
http://www.jc-news.com/coding/freedom/

Wait

[Stevyn]

Isn't hardware going to be free pretty soon though?

just a question

[louden obscure]

am i gonna need a kevlar blanket to drape over my damn box just in case a faulty disc explodes?

Re:just a question

[lachlan76]

CDs and DVDs are made of polycarbonate, aka Lexan, aka Bulletproof Glass.
Can't hurt to have everything integrated into one product.

I think I speak for many when I say

[ashot]

who cares?

6 minutes, 30 minutes, an hour, does it matter?

how often do people burn an entire DVD? If you burn so many that speed matters you probably shouldn't be using a consumer solution anyway.

Re:I think I speak for many when I say

[Anonymous Coward]

That's why I refuse to upgrade my 1x CD burner. It took a long time to produce the CD, it should take a long time to copy it too.

Are you serious!?!?

Re:I think I speak for many when I say

[the_bard17]

how often do people burn an entire DVD?

Any time anybody wants to back up a sizeable portion of their system. Which people ought to be doing fairly regularly, right? ;o)
If you burn so many that speed matters you probably shouldn't be using a consumer solution anyway.

You might have a point here... though it's not that "lost time" that matters. It's the perception of that lost time that matters. Nobody I know says "Oh, it's 'bout time I backed up my system. Let's go eat lunch while the DVD burns." Instead, they stare down that little progress bar. Then that additional burning time makes a difference.

Re:I think I speak for many when I say

[Anonymous Coward]

"how often do people burn an entire DVD? If you burn so many that speed matters you probably shouldn't be using a consumer solution anyway."

Only problem is it's so embarrasing asking the local duplication company to burn your porn...

Re:I think I speak for many when I say

[Anonymous Coward]

how often do people burn an entire DVD?

Netflix, dude! Get with the times.

Re:I think I speak for many when I say

[WiPEOUT]

If I burn even 1 DVD, the 20 minutes I save by cutting my burning time from 30 minutes to 10 is 20 minutes I can do something else -- like not waste time in front of my PC making backups.

Even if I only burn, say, 30 DVDs a year, that's 10 hours of my spare or working time that pay for the US$30 price difference.

I'll take the spare hours, thanks.

Re:I think I speak for many when I say

[digital bath]

Umm... what's keeping you from getting up and doing something else while the 30 minute burn is going?

Re:I think I speak for many when I say

[Frogbert]

Never been to a lan party huh?

Re:I think I speak for many when I say

[WiPEOUT]

Nothing, save that the DVD I need to take with me to do the other things I wanted to do with my time is sitting in the drive being prepared.

To compound this, the second, third, fourth, fifth, etc, are all waiting to be fed in, and I will be interrupted from whatever else I am doing that does not involve the DVD every 30 minutes until all of them are done.

Re:I think I speak for many when I say

[TheRaven64]

Me? I do quite a bit of amateur video editing and it takes me about 40 minutes to burn a DVD on my PowerBook. Doing a complete run (in the machine's idle time, when I'm reading or watching TV) takes up to a week depending on how many copies I need. Having one of these in a FireWire enclosure would make a lot of difference to that.

Re:I think I speak for many when I say

[Pooua]

how often do people burn an entire DVD?

FYI, I am scanning my old family photographs from negatives, and one batch resulted in files that are 80 Meg per photo. I could only fit 50 of these on a DVD (out of the 67 I scanned). I have hundreds of photos. I've also started shooting video on miniDV, which already could swamp my 250-Gig hard drive, much less my puny 4.7-Gig DVDs.

Re:I think I speak for many when I say

[Viceice]

With Bit Torrent and a DSL line.. Plenty. heck just last night i burned 2 seasons of Enterprise to DVD and i have one more season to go.. not to mention other shows.

Then theres my work. I'm a design student, and this semester alone my work came to over 6 GB and that is not including all the raw data i had to delete.

Anyway, while not many peopel have work files that run into gigabytes, i'm sure we all download tonnes of stuff that we want to keep.

Re:I think I speak for many when I say

[Bert64]

So you actually sit infront of your computer staring at the writing progress during the 30 minutes it takes to write a DVD? Don't you go away and do something else? Or don't you leave the writing process in the background and get on with something else? Theres no reason you cant continue doing other things while a dvd is burning.. the world doesn't stop!

Just in case the server crashes and burns...

[mirror_dude]

Just in case the server crashes and burns (like they usually do),I have put up a mirror.
The mirror of http://www.cdfreaks.com/ is at http://mirrorit.demonmoo.com/r_806/www.cdfreaks.co m/
The mirror of http://www.cdfreaks.com/article/145 is at http://mirrorit.demonmoo.com/r_806/www.cdfreaks.co m/article/145

Media price

[Sinful_Shirts]

I don't get it, can someone explain to me why the new media costs so much. Whenever a faster recorder comes out, whether it was a CD recorder in the past, or DVD recorders now, the media prices are so expensive. A couple of years ago DVD-R 4x media was really expensive, but now it's cheap... What's up with that? It's definitely something I have in mind before I buy something like this.

Re:Media price

[Patrick Cable II]

Economics! Supply and Demand.

When there was a short supply of DVD-r 4x media, it costs more as a result of short supply. There wasnt much demand, so no reason to have a large supply. As demand increased, supply increased and you had a lowering in price.

wow!

Re:Media price

[Anonymous Coward]

Price? Don't you need media for actual sale before you go overpaying for it?

I still haven't seen 8x media on shelves. DL drives are coming out but there's no media for them either, and now we have 16x drives -and guess what! No media.

If there WAS media, it'd be a couple of bucks a pop.

Nah, I'll stay with my 8x burner and 4x media and go DL when that's cheap enough. Pointless to worry about 16 now.

a summary

[vmircea]

Basically to give a little summary for people who like having information condensed into a readable form... of things you should know about this technology...

1. Unless you have a smoking hard drive you're not gonna see 16X speeds (ATA hard drive? you wish)

2. Unless your PC is relatively fast as well, in addition to a good deal of RAM (as in their test system) it's also not going to happen.

3. And an IMPORTANT note: Don't get caught up in the craze of getting the newest thing, this will probably cost an unholy amount when it comes out, and the requirements will be really high, which will add to the price as well. I have a 4X DVDRW and although it isn't anywhere near as fast, I don't need godly system specs to use it. And neither do I need to drop anything else I'm doing. Also note that on a lesser system that they tested it with you will see significantly slower writing.

Hope you found this helpful.

Re:a summary

[Covener]

1. Unless you have a smoking hard drive you're not gonna see 16X speeds (ATA hard drive? you wish)

What is it about 20MB/s or so that you think is excessive? Hard drives that cost well under a hundred dollars for in excess of 100GB can easily feed that to a DVD drive on the other channel. We're talking $400 PCs.

Re:a summary

[vmircea]

Sure, but keep in mind that the hard-drive is in constant use by the OS and other things at the same time, it is highly unlikely that you are not doing absolutely anything in the way of hard-drive usage. And I'm not saying this from experience, I may be wrong, but 1. I think that it is unlikely that a normal hard-drive will perform AT FULL performance i.e. the full 16x and 2. I think that they used a raid for a reason. Just my two cents.

Re:a summary

[sexecutioner]

In response to point (2).

You could also have 4GB of RAM (or so), and do the burn from there.

Just a thought.

Re:a summary

[vmircea]

Well yeah of course, wouldn't we all love 4 gigs of fast ram, but then you hit point 3. The money and the near uselessness. I love a huge ramdisk for doing operations as much as the next guy but it is kind of a waste, albeit a very cool waste.

Re:a summary

[kryptkpr]

My Western Digital Special Edition drive (model 800JB) is only ATA100, and I've benchmarked it at sustaining over 33 MB/sec .. more then enough for 16x recording speed, even with other things "constantly" using it (of which I'm skeptical by the way.. if I was going to burn something that fast, I'd give it my whole system for all of 6 minutes).

Re:a summary

[Anonymous Coward]

3. And an IMPORTANT note: Don't get caught up in the craze of getting the newest thing, this will probably cost an unholy amount when it comes out, and the requirements will be really high, which will add to the price as well.

But if you do get caught up in the craze, and spend unholy amounts of money, you have my thanks for helping to pay for the debugging so that the one I buy after the prices crash works well.

Re:a summary

[Pooua]

Responding to your points:

1. & 2. Many ordinary computer systems today can easily keep up with a 16x DVD burner. The burner, itself, may not be able to keep up with the system or its own burn speed. *cough* 2 Meg bugger *cough*

3. We are talking about BenQ. I really doubt very much that this 16x BenQ drive will cost even as much as an 8x Plextor. In fact, what I think BenQ did was simply overclock an ordinary 8x drive. They did that before, with a 4x drive to make an 8x drive, and the crummy system specs make it look very much like they simply overclocked some cheap 8x drive. That's one reason their drive has a 2 Meg buffer.

BTW, I bought my 8x Maddog DVD burner for $80 (special sale price at CompUSA). I am very happy with it.

Re:a summary

[Bert64]

Well, since a single sided dvd is 4.4GB or so, and a double sided is twice that.. and you'd need some overhead for the OS.. You would _NEED_ a 64bit machine to do this properly.. and people said there was no need for 64bit machines!

Re:a summary

[Bert64]

With an IDE disk you would need it on a different controller to the writer, and with other processes using it you would get nowhere near your peak rate.. Also even when running nothing else, most OS's will try to access the disk for various reasons, and ide disks don't handle multiple processes reading from them at once very well.
I burn DVD's at 8x quite happily from my old 18gig scsi drive made in 1999 or 2000 i believe, while doing other things in the background, such as reading slashdot and watching movies.

Re:a summary

[dsanfte]

I suppose you could buy like five gigs of ram and put the image to be burnt onto a ramdisk. That would help.

Hey, if you can afford a 16x drive, you can probably afford oodles of ram too.

Average write speed under 12x?

[Guspaz]

The average write speed on this drive barely qualifies it as a 12x drive. Claiming this is a 16x drive is silly.

8x drives typically pull in average write speeds of 0.4 to 0.6 x lower than their rated spec (Like the 7.44x quoted in this article)... but THIS drive is pulling 4.7x lower than it's rated spec. It's burning at 11.32x... In my mind, that classifies this drive as a 12x, NOT a 16x.

Re:Average write speed under 12x?

[Anonymous Coward]

I dont think DVD burners are rated by average write speed

Re:Average write speed under 12x?

[Jeff DeMaagd]

Well, I don't think any 52x CD writer can write a 52 minute CD in one minute.

In short, the drive manufacturers lie. When the drive speeds go up, RPMs go up, but they have to limit them otherwise imbalanced discs will shatter. RPMs being a limiter, they are effectively CAV drives, so the data can only be written so quickly near the center. Usually the stated write speed is only on the edge of the disc.

Re:Average write speed under 12x?

[Anonymous Coward]

[...]but THIS drive is pulling 4.7x lower than it's rated spec[...]

Is it 4.7x lower or 4.7x less ?

Re:Average write speed under 12x?

[PhrostyMcByte]

That's because it uses CAV (Constant Angular Velocity) while burning, which makes it start at a low speed (4x) in the center and work up to a higher speed (16x) as it nears the edges.

Re:Average write speed under 12x?

[swv3752]

It is speed at the outer edge of the disk. This is why one gets diminishing returns as one gets faster drives. A 16x CDRW drive is only a little less the twice as fast as a 8x drive. A 32x is not nearly as twice as fast as a 16x drive. And a 48x drive is barely faster than a 24x drive.

I have a 24x drive, but wrote a bunch of discs at 16x because that was what my media was rated for. The difference between 16x and 24x was about a minute.

Re:Average write speed under 12x?

[alexo]

> The average write speed on this drive barely qualifies it as a 12x drive.
> Claiming this is a 16x drive is silly.

No, it is not silly. It's just creative marketing which, incidently, was in common use since CD readers reached 8X speeds.

This particular drive uses CAV (Constant Angular Velocity) technology. That means that the disk spins at a constant speed, just like your old LP record players.
The circumference of an inner track is smaller than that of an outer track and yet thay take the same time to complete a revolution. That means that the linear speed thatthe laser reads/writes is lower on the inner tracks than on the outer. The speed increases from the inside to the outside but since CD and DVD disks are written from the inside out, you may not reach the max speed at all if the disk is not full.

Ignoring the "dips" (write quality adjustment attempts), the speed graph should be close to linear.

Most other drives use eithr Z-CLV or P-CAV to achieve higher average speeds.
See here, here or here for an explanation of the terms and here for a comparison.

Re:Average write speed under 12x?

[Guspaz]

Which is my point; another drive will eventually come out that has an EFFECTIVE write speed of (near) 16x becuase it will use a Z-CLV or P-CAV. To qualify this drive as 16x is false advertising; it may finish burning at 16x, but compared to the eventual TRUE 16x drives, this is a 12x drive.

Re:Average write speed under 12x?

[alexo]

> another drive will eventually come out that has an EFFECTIVE write speed of (near) 16x becuase it will use a Z-CLV or P-CAV.

Nope, 16X Z-CLV or P-CAV will never achieve an effective speed of near 16X.

Consider the current 52X CD writers. Theoretically, at that speed, one should be able to burn an 80-min CD in just 92 seconds. In practice, however, the drives do it in 150 seconds (average), about 60% of the maximum speed.

The reason for that discrepancy is that all the fastest drives use CAV for their highest rating speed. That's bacause CAV can keep the drive rotating at its maximum speed all the time while the other technologies slow it down.

52X for CDs is close to the maximum practical speed of spinning the disk before wobble and other effects force you to slow down. The same is true for 16X DVDs (well, you may be able to reach consistently good 18X but at this point the law of diminishing returns makes it not worth the effort. You don't see many 54X CD drives, do you?)

Re:Average write speed under 12x?

[Guspaz]

According to the article, this 16x CAV drive is spinning the disc at a more or less constant ~7x... If the theoretical max speed a disc can be spun at is 16x, then why are we stuck at spinning it at 7x? There seems to be a lot of overhead for a different method to get a 16x average write speed.

Re:Average write speed under 12x?

[alexo]

There is a difference between the linear and the angular speeds.

Re:Average write speed under 12x?

[Guspaz]

And I'm talking about the angular velocity, the speed the disc is actually spinning at. This drive only spins the disc at 7x, which gets 16x at the outside track due to the greater circumferance. There's plenty of room to spin faster, from 7x.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding all this. I assume that the listed angular velocity is the speed the actual disc is spinning, and therefore can ramp up to 16x. Is this not true? Can angular velocity not be used to measure the speed a disc spins at?

Regardless, we KNOW that the disc can spin faster, because the benchmarks for the 8x drive show the angular velocity starting at 8x and ramping down, whereas this drive is at 7x. So regardless if I'm totally wrong in the previous paragraph, we know the drive can at LEAST spin 1x faster.

Theoretical DVD burning limit

[Prince Vegeta SSJ4]

they have already reched this, and can basically burn at instantaneous speeds

link HERE

Re:Theoretical DVD burning limit

[amiable1]

This prompted me to check why the phenomenon.
Flints today are apparently made of Cerium Mischmetal.
See here for details.
Any chemists out there?

Grandparent is *not* an isolated incident.

[The Darkness]

No, and CDs don't work like that either.

Sorry to burst your bubble, but they most certainly do.

It most certainly could be that an old drive can't read discs burned by newer, faster drives. The older drives may be less fault tolerant. Pre-pressed discs could be ok but a disc burned too fast could have pits just slightly too close together or too far apart that confuse the older drive.

I have seen this happen with CDs on more than one occasion. Slowing down the burn speed made a disc usable by the older drive. Think PSX backups.

In fact, there should be no..

Should being the key word.
A Wise man whose name I can't remember once said: In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is.

Re:Grandparent is *not* an isolated incident.

[ahaning]

Slowing down the burn speed made a disc usable by the older drive.

I know I'm contradicting my post above, but I'm seeing where this might not be completely false. Perhaps the slower burn speed results in deeper pits which the older drives are able to distinguish better?

Though, I'd think that maybe the drives could change the strength of the laser in proportion to the speed of the drive, so that a faster drive would require a stronger laser?

I have absolutely no idea how things work in reality*, so I could be completely wrong.

[*Not that this has ever stopped anyone from posting to Slashdot before, but I thought I'd just mention this anyway.]

Re:Grandparent is *not* an isolated incident.

[Alioth]

IIRC, the reason your old CD drive might not read a CD-R burned at high speed is because the new high speed writers use CAV (constant angular velocity - i.e. the disk RPM remains the same regardless of whether you're writing a track near the hub or near the edge). Older CD drives may not be able to do CAV since the CD standard is for CLV (constant linear velocity - the bit of disk right over the head is always going the same speed relative to the read head, hence the disk is spun faster on tracks near the hub and spun slower on tracks near the edge).

Re:Grandparent is *not* an isolated incident.

[dbitter1]

A Wise man whose name I can't remember once said: In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is.

The saying goes: "The difference between theory and practice is greater in practice than theory"

Re:Grandparent is *not* an isolated incident.

[Cryogenes]

The wise man you whose name you can't remember is Jan L.A. van de Snepscheut

Re:Grandparent is *not* an isolated incident.

[radish]

Yes it _can_ happen (I've heard stories like yours before) but to say they "work that way" is clearly wrong.

I have burned a lot of audio CDs over the years, on burners from a 2x HP up to a 52x Lite On. I've played back those discs on a huge range of players - an old Marantz CD80 (classic CD player), newer DVD players by Pioneer and Samsung, several car CD players, portables, etc. You get the picture - lots of burners, lots of players, lots of speeds. The _only_ time I've not been able to play back one of the CDs I burned was when a friend had a Sony mini-system which, it turned out, would not play any CD-Rs.

Re:Grandparent is *not* an isolated incident.

[geolane]

Another factor is 80 minute vs. 75 minute capacity- newer disks are often 700 Mb capacity, where the "reference standard" is for 650Mb 75 minute capacity.

DVDs aren't more durable, but...

[drewhearle]

The physical limits of CD burning (the speeds that often cause shattering) aren't because CDs are easily breakable. It's because CDs are imperfectly manufactured, and therefore imbalanced - a CD spinning at 52x that isn't perfectly round will be wobbling with an incredible amount of force.

So... for DVDs to be able to spin at faster speeds, the discs (and drives) will have to be manufactured to very high specs. Very slight variations in the roundness of the disc would cause enough vibration to break the disc. A non-round or off-center hole in the middle would also cause this problem.

Re:DVDs aren't more durable, but...

[Pooua]

I recall reading that a major contributor to optical media fatigue is crystalization of the plastic. The faster the disk spins, the more intense the laser beam must be, so the dye can be converted in a shorter time. This more intense laser beam also heats the plastic, which causes some structural change in the plastic. When the plastic cools, some of it crystalizes. Crystaline plastic is fragile. At the high stress of modern drive speeds (a CD spinning at 48x is spinning at 200 miles per hour on its outer edge), the disk tends to fracture.

Better chemistry could make the dye more sensitive and the plastic less prone to crystalization. This might allow higher spin rates.

Re:DVDs aren't more durable, but...

[Hurricane78]

Even a label or writing with a pen to it could make the disc unreadable. (i read this in a test, and when you read at what speeds the disc rotates you'll understand that...)

Re:DVDs aren't more durable, but...

[lachlan76]

Perhaps this will change your mind on the strength of polycarbonate.
Bear in mind that a CD at 52x spins at 10900rpm.
The old PS1 discs would sometimes explode. And not explode as in crack, explode as in cd-drive-faceplate-on-the-other-side-of-the-room.

Mrs. Malda

[Anonymous Coward]

is a demon in the sack. Sure, her ass might be a little dented and has 100,000 mi of cock on it, but I like that look. Especially when she wears those pink spandex shorts up her ass, you know and when the pussy lips are separated and she lets me stare at it for 8 hours and then she lets me have it. That's is what I call one hell of a woman.

Re:Ewww, BenQ (Yay BenQ burners!

[Endareth]

Not having had any direct experience with their monitors I can't comment, but I tend to use BenQ and Lite-On almost exclusively for my cd/dvd burners and media. My coaster rate when using BenQ has been far lower (almost zero) than any others I use.

holy shit

[Perianwyr Stormcrow]

That explains a whole lot. The only other manufacturer I could think of with such a failure rate was Acer... and I didn't remember if they made anything anymore, since their old stuff ssssssucked.

Adam Venus

[Anonymous Coward]

Die, die, die, choke on your own blood, you satanic pigdog scum.

Nice!

[IloveMorphine]

these dual layer drives will make duping rented DVD's sooo much easier! I can't wait to get one!

Re:Nice!

[Anonymous Coward]

The best way to dupe those rental DVDs is to transcode them into SVCD and burn them to a couple of CDRs.

Just a few cents per movie and the quality of SVCD is, for all intents and purposes, every bit as good as DVD on most TV sets.

Best of all, you get to stop half-way through the movie and grab another beer while you're changing disks!

Why wait?

[emkman]

We are already at dual-layer and 16x speeds. I think the wait is over. I have an optorite dvd burner that does +r and -r and i got it for 150$ half a year ago. Remember how long it took for cd burners to get down to that price? Id say DVD burners are progressing really fast, and for the price there is really no reason to wait. There is plenty of software out for movie authoring, and now that dual-layer blanks are available, pretty much any disc can be duplicated. Sure I wish my burner was dual-layer, but Id rather buy another new one for 100$ in a few months then have waited and not had the dvd-burner I have now. If your gonna wait 2 years to get a dvd burner, Ill be laughing at you with my solid state terrabyte drive that just got upgraded from 500x to 1000x.

SCSI SCSI

[superpulpsicle]

Where is SCSI devices nowadays. That was the greatest internal/external interface you can get. How it's just obsolete. There is a whole 2 brands of SCSI DVDs, all of which remain at $100+ since there is just no competition. Has anyone tried the SCSI-to-IDE converters?

Re:SCSI SCSI

[Anonymous Coward]

SCSI just isn't worth the money for CD and DVD drives. IDE, especially SATA, is plenty fast enough and a whole lot cheaper.

Re:SCSI SCSI

[mog007]

Using a SCSI-IDE solution would make you lose out on the speed increases, if they existed. Check out some reviews of those Raptor SATA drives that run at 10k RPM, they've got almost identical speeds as SCSI.

Re:SCSI SCSI

[NewtonsLaw]

What? You mean they've replaced MFM and RLL drives already?

Hell, I hope my ESDI drive isn't rendered obsolete any time soon.

Now where's that 128KB 8" hard-sectored floppy disk I use for backups?

Re:SCSI SCSI

[Anonymous Coward]

320Mb per channel, is a tidy bit faster than the 150Mb claimed by SATA.

You have Serial SCSI comming out, which will blow SATA away and also allow you to connect SATA drives to it.

In addition SCSI can do 6 or move devices per channel and IDE only 2 and SATA only 1.

I know why real servers still use SCSI!

damn

[hawkbug]

You know what, screw these fast speeds. I hate it. I burn my DVDs at 1x because the Sony Playstation and other stand alone dvd players barf on discs that are even burned at 2.4x or higher. 16x is just plain stupid, really stupid. What in the hell would use that for? You couldn't play it in an Xbox, PS2, or 90% of stand alone dvd players. Yeah yeah, I know - the disc type matters - but even the best discs barely read in my PS2 burned at 2.4x. Barely is being generous. What I REALLY want is the ability to burn a damn DVD at whatever speed I want BELOW the disc type. If I buy a 4x disc, I can only burn it at 4x using Nero and any other cd burning software. Screw that. If I want to burn it at 1x, I should be able to damn it.

Re:damn

[Erwos]

Uh, you know, some of us use DVDs for backups and CD consolidation. It's not all about illegal IP infringement.

My mom, for instance, put all of her clip-art CDs onto a single DVD. Very handy for searching for a particular piece of art for a newsletter. And I could probably back up my HD onto a couple DVDs rather than the six or so CDs it takes to just get the super-important stuff off.

-Erwos

Re:damn

[Anonymous Coward]

You seriously need to rethink the media you are using if your experience leads to the conclusion that higher speed = 90% unplayable in stuff.

http://www.firmware-flash.com
http://www.dvdrhe lp.com
http://www.cdfreaks.com

Re:damn

[Anonymous Coward]

The other poster is right - I burn at 2.4x and 4x, my PS2 reads them fine. In fact, I can't recall a single coaster, even with cheap'n'nasty blanks (Dabs Value, wtf was I thinking...).

Re:damn

[hawkbug]

Before you go accusing people of things you have no clue about, read the post again. I said NERO. Not a dvd ripping program, NERO. I do a lot of archiving my old hi8 home movies via firewire onto my computer - and I send copies of these movies (mostly of my 1 yr old son) to my grandparents, parents, brother, etc. They all take an interest in his life even though he's a thousand miles or so from them. Sorry if you may find that odd - so get off your fucking high horse - because even if I did use a dvd ripper to copy movies, it would be of movies I own and want a backup of because when my son gets his hands on a DVD, it is never the same. He likes movies like Monsters Inc, and I'll be damned if I go buy a copy of it every time he helps himself when he wants to watch it. It's not the consumers fault the MPAA made an easily destructible media, and then chastize and try to make it impossible for people to back up this media.

Re:damn

[hawkbug]

Well, you're lucky. The other poster and yourself seem to have good luck with discs, because if you do some actual research via groups.google.com or something similar, you'll find many, many, many people with my same complaint.

16x DVD = 21MB/s (roughly)

[doormat]

21MB/s isnt all that fast. The new WD SATA drives are from 35MB/s to 60MB/s. No, a 5400 drive wont cut it, but any 7200 drive made in the past 2 years should be good. See here and look at "WB99 Disk/Read Transfer Rate - End in MB/Sec".

Re:16x DVD = 21MB/s (roughly)

[Anonymous Coward]

Since windows doesn't support sata it doesn't make a diff even if the mobo and the hdd are sata, the drive still works at ata-100

HOW FAST is COMMERCIAL MANF?

[earthstar]

How is Mass manufacturing of CD's/DVD's done?( commercial purposes like the ones that come with computer mags etc). At what speed do they write?How do they do? Any one know?

Re:HOW FAST is COMMERCIAL MANF?

[Pooua]

In the old days, at least, commercial CDs were made through a plating process. I am fairly certain this is still in use for "pressed" disks.

First, an original is made (out of wax, I think), then a negative image is created using a plating process. I don't remember how the original is created. The negative is good for thousands of pressed disks, in which it creates pits and lands in the reflective substrate. The substrate is sandwiched in the plastic media.

As you can see, the writing process is not the linear process of writing tracks that are used in home systems, so the writing speed isn't quite a measure of the same thing. They can create hundreds or even thousands of disks an hour.

Just FYI regarding CDRs...

[Synonymous Yellowbel]

CDRs don't use pits and lands, they use dyes which change colour, and thus reflect the read laser differently, when "burned". steve

I can burn at 20M/sec

[Anonymous Coward]

In Nero I can burn a DVD image file from my hard drive TO the same hard drive at 21MB/sec. That's a transfer rate of 42MB/sec. I see no reason why I cannot burn from this same hard drive to a separate device.

I don't see what you gain from this negativity.

You may be right...

[Cyno01]

I know DVDs are spec'd to higher tolerances, but i havn't seen a dvd reader above 16x, and my 3 year old compaq has one. And 52x is a bit past the limit on CDs sometimes.

Uh, how about no...

[Cyno01]

Me and some friends of mine did a short movie and did a run of about 100 copies. It took us about 50 hours total, just burning. I dont know how much having a small run like that pressed would cost, but i'm sure its more than the cost of 100 DVDs and our time (which is obviously worthless). But yeah, it woulda been nice to save some time.

Re:Uh, how about no...

[Jeff DeMaagd]

You could put in a second DVD burner? Or hire a DVD-write replicator? There are machines that automatically write the same content automatically on a large batch of DVD-R discs, so the manual disc exchange isn't necessary.

Anyway, I'm not against the faster drives if that means I can still somehow operate them at slower speeds, but other than Nero's stupid slow-down utility, I don't know how. I hated the 50x and faster CD-R drives because they were so dang loud and barely amounted to a noticible difference in speed over a 32x drive.

I guess I'll stick with my Pioneer A06U for a while now, it's fast enough for most tasks.

Just wait it out...

[Cyno01]

I'm getting a dual layer burner (sort of) for my next computer, but i dont plan on buying dual layer media any time soon, its still +$10 a disc. Once it gets down to maybe 2 or 3 dollars a disc then i'll switch to the better media. Dont bother buying the faster stuff untill its cheap enough or worth the time saved.

Anime

[Anonymous Coward]

"Otaku unite." -
Niira - nayami@anime-chat.com

So you're argument is...

[rsilvergun]

that you can spend an extra 20 minutes working? I think it's time to bust out the 2x cd-rws for my 80 gig drive...

Do These Numbers Look Right to You?

[Pooua]

I am perplexed by the numbers given for this so-called, "16x" DVD burner. Let's start with the rated speeds, and compare it to my 2-month old Maddog 8x Dominator 6-in-1 Dual DVD burner.

First, the BenQ:

Writing DVD+R discs: 16x
Writing DVD+RW discs: 4x
Writing DVD+R Dual Layer discs: 2.4x
Writing CD-R discs: 40x
Writing CD-RW discs: 24x
Reading DVD-Discs: 16x
Reading CD-Discs: 40x
Access time CD/DVD: 120ms
Buffer: 2Mb

Now, my Maddog:

Writing DVD+/-R discs: 8x
Writing DVD+/-RW discs: 4x
Writing DVD+R Dual Layer discs: Unk*
Writing CD-R discs: 32x
Writing CD-RW discs: 16x
Reading DVD-Discs: 12x
Reading CD-Discs: 40x
Access time CD/DVD: 110/130 ms
Buffer: 2Mb

As you can see, the specs show that my 8x Maddog is almost as fast as the 16x BenQ!

Then, there is the statement in the review that says it only takes an average of about 6 minutes to burn a DVD at 16x (actually, average speed is only 11.32x). Compare this to the 8-to-9 minutes it takes to burn a DVD at 8x.

These results are underwhelming. I would expect more from a 16x DVD burner.

*Rumor on Usenet is that some DVD burners, such as the Pioneer A07 currently on the market, will be able to burn dual-layer DVDs with a simple firmware upgrade. Indeed, some of these models already *have* burned dual-layer in hacked versions. No word on where people got the dual-layer media.

Re:Do These Numbers Look Right to You?

[julesh]

No word on where people got the dual-layer media.

I was in my local PC World (UK's leading PC retailer) yesterday. They have recently acquired a stock of dual-layer writers. I asked about dual layer media and the assistant looked blank, pointing to the boxes of single-layer media that had been stacked next to the writers.

"You just use normal media with it."

"No, you see it says 4.7Gb here on the box of blanks, and the writer box says it can do 8.5Gb"

"Oh, don't worry about that. The main thing is it's faster. It does an 8 speed write."

???

Wow. How?

[trezor]

I do run Windows XP and Slackware, both being nice and gentle detecting the SATA-drive. However getting XP to run off the SATA drive was next to impossible.

I made it happen -once-, by doing a fresh install onto a standard ATA-drive, with the SATA-controller low-level drivers provided as a first thing(tm) to Windows Setup.

For the record: Windows did specificly say the SATA-drive "was not a Windows compatible (blahblah) drive for installation" or something like that, and refused to even try. But by running Symantec Ghost, doing a basic partition copy from the ATA drive to the SATA drive, I made Windows XP boot off the SATA drive.

I have however not been able to repeat this procedure succesfully... So how did you actually make WinXP install itself on a SATA drive?!?

Re:Wow. How?

[Pooua]

The other poster, anethema (99553), looks more experienced and knowledgeable about the process than I am, but since you asked me, I will also provide my answer.

I installed the hardware in the normal way. Then, I booted the Windows XP CD, as normal. There is a step here that I don't recall clearly, but I recall having to press the F6 key when prompted. Windows will ask for RAID drivers, which must be installed in the root directory of a floppy disk. Windows will load the RAID drivers, which enables it to see the SATA drives. Installation continues normally from that point.

The hardest part for me was copying all the files to the correct location on the floppy. I initially tried to copy the entire folder over from my motherboard manufacturer, but Windows would not look into any sub-directories. I only needed to install a few files on the floppy. One was the SATA/RAID driver, but there was another, too. I don't recall what it was, but Windows will name it if it doesn't find it.

I found the procedure on Usenet. It is a simple Google search. I would do it now, but I am too tired.

Re:Wow. How?

[MindStalker]

Thats basically right, when looking for the right files to put on the floppy, look for a directory with a file called oemsetup it will probably be under the main driver directory on the cd that came with your MB. Copy that entire directories contents to the floppy (there should be no directories on the floppy, just the files). When installing XP press F6 when it says Press F6 to load SCSI or RAID drivers. The rest you just follow along with whats on the screen.

Re:Wow. How?

[FictionPimp]

I didn't set it up raid. But all I had to do was the following.

• Open case
• Remove old IDE hard drive (to be put back in after the process and to make sure my data base safe from me being stupid sometimes)
• Insert new SATA drive
• Turn on computer, insert Windows XP cd with SP1.
• Remeber that you forgot to set bios to boot from cd and reboot and setup bios
• Windows detected the drive fine and I formated NTFS.

Thats all there was to me. I did have a weird issue though on my friends pc. I kept his old drive in place and when it booted into windows, his old drive kept the c:\ designation. Which caused problems with some poorly written software he liked. The only solution I found was removing the old drive and reformatting as windows won't let you change the drive letter of the primary drive.

Maybe there was a problem in windows XP that was fixed in SP1?

Re:Wow. How?

[trezor]

Well... This was basicly what I did, but then again, my SATA bios runs after my ordinary one, so maybe Windows had an issue with that?

Still, I find it strange that Windows will boot of a hacked installation, but deny me to make a proper one.

What the hell... It really doesn't matter that much anyway.

Re:Wow. How?

[dupeisdead]

It all depends on your hardware. The Intel 865/875 and higher chipset are the only ones (i'm familiar with anyway) that support native SATA - meaning the motherboard itself treats the builtin SATA controller as a standard IDE controller and passes it straight through to the OS. Meaning XP sees any devices attached to it without any problems. The next generation of MBs with SATA are suppose to have native controller as well.... someday. The VIA and SIS chipsets do not have builtin SATA - if you look at the motherboard, you will see a silicon image or promise technologies chip somewhere on the board. Unfortunately, until the other manufacturers build SATA directly into the chipset, you will need to do the F6 install the driver... or doing it via ghost is one way of doing it, but kinda roundabout. Generally, installing the drivers off a floppy disk has worked on various promise based SATA controllers i've used on motherboards. Haven't used any boards with SI controller though.... as always in the tech world, YMMV.

Very Funny.

[Viceice]

This being Slashdot, before i realised it was a joke, my head nearly fell off after seeing your question.. : )

Re:Very Funny.

[ahaning]

Strange as it may seem, you will meet a generally more intelligent person here. I spent a while away (at sharingthegroove.org) and I soon became fed up with the way the boards worked and the people that posted there. Bump, bump, bump, *graphical smiley*, *graphical WTF*, *wacky picture*, HAHAHAHAAHHA.

I still use the site, just not as much as I once did.

Now, when I was first reading this story, I was rather saddened to see the newbies that were posting. I suppose this is the same sort of sadness that the less-than-5-digit-UID people felt when people like me first joined. Oh well, hopefully the dumb newbies won't last long.

This is that joke

[ptlis]

Dear Boy, Just a few lines to let you know I am still alive. I am writing this letter slowly because I know you cannot read fast. You won't know the house when you come home - we have moved. It was a lot of trouble moving. The most difficult thing was the bed. You see the man wouldn't let us take it in the taxi. It wouldn't have been too bad if your father hadn't been in it at the time. About your father he has a lovely new job. He has 500 men under him, he is cutting the grass at the cemetery. Your sister got herself engaged to that fellow she has been going with He gave her a beautiful ring with three stones missing. Our neighbour the Kowalskis started to keep pigs, we got wind of it this morning. I got my appendix out and a new dishwasher put in. There was a washing machine in the new house when we moved in, but it isn't working too good. Last week, I put four shirts into it, pulled the chain and haven't seen the shirts since. Your little brother came home from school yesterday; all the boys in his school have new suits. We can't afford to buy him a new suit but we are going to buy him a new hat and let him look out the window. Your sister, Mary had a new baby this morning. I haven't heard yet whether it was a girl or a boy so I don't know whether you're an aunt or an uncle. Your uncle Dick was drowned last week in a vat of moonshine in Two Hills, four of his friends tried to save him, but he fought them bravely off. We cremated his body and it took three days to put the fire out. Kate is now working in a factory in Edmonton. She has been there now for six weeks. I am sending her some clean underwear as she says she's been in the same shift since she started. Your father didn't have much to drink last Christmas - I put a bottle of castor oil in his pint of beer; it kept him going 'til New Year's day. I went to the Doctor on Thursday, your father came with me. The Dr. put a small glass tube in my mouth and told me not to open it up for ten minutes. Your father wanted to buy it from him. It only rained twice last week. First for three days, then for four days. Monday was so windy that one of our chickens laid the same egg four times. We had a letter yesterday from the undertaker. He said if the first instalment isn't paid on your Grandmother's grave within seven days, up she come. I must close now because the plumber is coming to repair the pipe and there is a shocking smell. Your loving mother. P.S. I was going to send you $10,000 but I already sealed the envelope.

It's more than that

[mdarksbane]

The polycarb that the CD's are made out of starts to deform at high speed. Even if it were perfectly balanced to begin with, if you spun it faster than 52x for a little while, it wouldn't be any more.

Eventually the stress from the deformation becomes too much and they explode.

I remember a study where they put a teflon wire on the outside of the cd. The polycarb warped around the wire at high speed.

So, in short, it'll take a bit more re-engineering than that to get higher rpm's out of CD's.

Ok, now find the media for it!

[AwesomeJT]

It seems even 8x media is hard to come by without ordering online. I can't just run down to Walmart or BestBuy and scarf up a pack 8x media. How long for 16x media, and forget dual layer discs. Although I have an 8x drive, I still mostly buy 4x media (good quality brands on sale/instant rebates at local stores -- difficult to resist).

Yes...

[Anonymous Coward]

...and everyone defrags everyday too!

Why be choosy?

[Ride-My-Rocket]

Just wait until the dual-core AMD and Intel CPUs start hitting the market in force in 2005 / 2006. You'll be able to dedicate one core CPU to UT24k and one to DVD burning without having to suffer any gaming downtime. Of course, just think of what you could do if you dedicate BOTH cores to gaming....... ;)

software for ripping movies

[Anonymous Coward]

Does anyone know of any software for ripping movies (entire movies or just excerpts) from commercial dvd movies??

Re:software for ripping movies

[Anonymous Coward]

testing

OT: moderation discussion

[julesh]

Note to mods: the above should have been moderated Interesting, not Insightful.

WTF's the difference, anyway? The comment was both, in my opinion. The poster expressed his insight into the situation, which might not be entirely relevant to the current market still qualifies as an insight. It was also an interesting one.

Re:OT: moderation discussion

[WiPEOUT]

We call Galileo's observations of gravity insightful, because they were made at a time when the prevailing wisdom did not account for his theories.

If today you were to tell educated people that gravity is fairly constant, you'd get funny looks and comments along the lines of "yeah, and your point is ...?".

The first was Insightful. The second was potentially Informative, but hardly insightful.

The original comment in question would have been insightful in the mid 90s, but ten years later is simply historically informative. Furthermore, the comment's implied comparison between technological conditions in the mid 90s vs now are inaccurate, making the comment uninsightful.

Don't forget Lite-On

[Ride-My-Rocket]

Anyways, let BenQ take the brunt of a new tech. If I'd want a 16x dvd+-rw drive so badly, I'd wait for very good quality ( Plextor ) or a good medium between quality and price. ( NEC )

Lite-On has actually surprised me with the quality of the products they offer, particularly because their products tend to be so much cheaper than market leaders like Plextor.

Re:Don't forget Lite-On

[Halthar]

I have had the same experience with Lite-On products. Every optical drive I have gotten from them has been consistently rock solid. I have only had one issue with my combo DVD/CD-RW drives, but that is the fault of the 2.6 Linux Kernel series (2.4.X Kernel reads the discs flawlessly).

At this point I have 16 Lite-On drives in my computers in my apartment, and all of them have run flawlessly since purchase, aside from things outside of their control (Kernel problem).

Great products which are also very affordable. If I am not mistaken, many of the "brand name" products are rebranded Lite-Ons with a markup, but I will have to check on that.

Re:Don't forget Lite-On

[harkabeeparolyn]

I hope Lite-On's products are rock-solid because it couldn't be more obvious from the stilted langauge on the web site that a conversation with customer service is going to be a frustrating experience.

Re:Don't forget Lite-On

[Anonymous Coward]

And don't forget that Lite-On supplies Sony with most of their cd/dvd-related peripherals, so they can't be that terrible...

I don't get it

[carlmenezes]

They've come up with DVD burners that write data at such a speed that now the Hard drives might not be able to keep up.

So...I'm either missing something here, but assuming they can read the DVDs as fast as they can write them and given the quantity of data storage, looks like we'll easily be able to switch from hard disks to DVDs in the near future.

Besides, what were the hard drive companies doing anyway? How is it that they have let DVD burners catch up?

The only difference seems to be the size...so does it have something to do with the motor used and heat generated or that kinda thing? Coz if that's not the case, I'd really be interested in knowing why we're in danger of having our hard drives out-paced.

Re:I don't get it

[Skjellifetti]

It is not necessarily the HD, but more likely some combo of PCI bus bandwidth limitations and memory size. The burner needs a steady stream of supplied data or it will just create a coaster. The faster the burn rate and the more data to burn, the more likely that something will stall the process. But if 52x write speeds work with CDs, I'd expect 52x to work with DVDs eventually as long as the computer isn't doing anything else and has enough memory to provide a sufficient buffer.

Re:I don't get it

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would this be surprising? Storing data with light is the next step. One day all your data will be stored in a 3 dimensions and lasers will play a big part of that. There is only so much that magnetic media can hold on a flat 2 dimensional platter. If lasers can burn DVD's faster, then disk drive companies will start developing them. Maybe they'll come out with sealed multi-layer DVD-style drives to replace current aluminum platter disk drives. There will be no head contact and the drive could be sealed, so that they don't wear out as quickly as they do now. They probably need to be sealed eventually to prevent the data corruption from dust and scratches as the dye sizes get smaller and the lasers move from infrared(for CD's) to red(for DVD's) to blue(Sony Blue-Ray) to UV to X-ray. Multiple layers also means that you don't need multiple platters, just a single thicker one made of lighter weight plastic instead of aluminum, so there will be more data density while requiring less energy on spin up.

I don't see the danger in having our current aluminum platter drive outpaced. I see new storage technology on the horizon that will be faster and more efficient.

Re:I don't get it

[eofpi]

DVD speeds are much faster (around 10x) than CD speeds. But still, 16x DVD is only 20MB/s. Just about any hard drive available in the past 5 years should be able to handle that sustained read speed, as long as it's not doing anything else.

Re:I don't get it

[spectral]

any cd burner over 8x is essentially guaranteed to have burnproof. No dvd burner made that I know of would risk NOT having it. 8x dvd burn is MUCH faster than an 8x cd burn, as other comments have shown.

The buffer is nice, but underflows aren't tragic anymore, and haven't been for years.

16x DVD+R is already faster than a 52x CDR

[rahulnair]

A 16x DVD+R writes 4.7 GB of data in 6 minutes while a 52x CDR takes about 4(?) minutes to write 700 MB. Even an 8x DVD writer is already using waaaaay more bandwidth than the fastest available CD writer

Buzz-word Bingo

[Seek_1]

Did anyone else get the urge to play Buzz-word Bingo when they read this??