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DVD Writer RoundUp
CodeHog writes "Got socks instead of the new DVD writer you were looking for this holiday season? Tom's Hardware has a writeup on the latest DVD writers and their 'true speeds'. The conclusions may be surprising: higher speeds won't necessarily do any good as media availability continues to be a problem." From the article: "Despite the stagnation of write speeds for DVD-R and DVD+R at 16x, new DVD writers are regularly being marketed, since performance for other types of writing (RW and dual-layer) is still improving. But as is customary, manufacturers of writers have a lead on media manufacturers. For this article, we visited all the stores to see what types of media are actually available for sale, and once again the result was most enlightening. You can find 16x-compatible -R and +R discs, but in the other formats they simply aren't out there."
Yes, you can find some, but they're not avaiable in the same specs the high end PATA versions. Are they that difficult to make? Because it seems like this would be a good way to at least get the enthusiasts buying new drives. I'd like to make my next computer purely SATA based.
Never trust a DVD writer review that doesn't take into account burn quality and media compatibility. That's how DVD drives differentiate themselves today.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
And we weren't even able to find anybody to sell us dual-layer DVD-Rs!
D -R
Wow, really? Where did they look?
http://froogle.google.com/froogle?q=dual-layer+DV
Bradley Holt
Also see my journal about Nero 7 DvD burning probs.In short ,stick with Nero Version 6.X
Why does yahoo do this
Track width tolerance. The faster the disc spins, the more it matters.
In the CD-RW and DVD-RW arena, I'll be slower to judge as I haven't seen the same kind of variances; then again, once I've purchased RW media, I don't need to purchase more so I haven't seen a wide variety of brands in this area. I suspect that a similar situation exists.
I haven't even touched DL-R or DL-RW yet - the media costs are prohibitive. Who wants to pay 8-10x as much per platter for a medium which only delivers around 1.8x the data density?
In the end, I'm not too sure I care so much about write times (hey, I can spare a few extra seconds when I burn a DVD or CD - it's not like I do so for a living), so much as data reliability, medium durability, media cost and compatibility.
Bottom line - while the drive is important, it's nothing without the media; so long as the drive functions correctly, it seems likely that there's more to be gained by selecting the proper media for use in the drive.
I've noticed that strange things happen with storage technology. First we had 5.25" floppies. I used the same 5.25" floppies for months and had no troubles with bad sectors and unreadable files. Than 3.5" appeared and we have just realized that old-style floppies are not reliable and loosing data due to disk error is really easy. 3.5" disk was hard to damage and could be used for months or even years. After that, the era of CDs/CD-R/CD-RW began. Diskettes again appeared very unreliable. At some moment, I've realized that I'm not sure that I'll be able to read data written on the floppy I bought yesterday! But, CD-R or CD-RW seemed everlasting and very, very, very reliable storage medium. There was no such thing like unreadable CD. The CD drive speeds was growing, but the quality and reliability was going down! Now we have DVD era, and when I burn a CD with my CD-RW, I always check that the data was written correctly and can be read. Sometimes, I have even to burn a disk two times to be absolutely sure. Probably the DVD storage medium will have the same fate. Will it ever end?