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DVD Writer RoundUp

Posted by Zonk on from the git-on-little-drives dept.

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."

5 of 146 comments (clear)

  1. Where are the good SATA burners? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  2. Some Advice by 1000StonedMonkeys · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Some Advice by ppz003 · · Score: 5, Interesting

      That's what I can't understand about these types of reviews. So what if one drive can write faster than any other if I lose the data a couple years before the other drives' outputs. Maybe people who back up data constantly for a living might be concerned with the speed, but for my money, I'll burn as slow as needed to achieve a consistantly readable disk.

      This review would be much more interesting if they showed some quality data with each burner.

    2. Re:Some Advice by undeadly · · Score: 5, Informative
      This review would be much more interesting if they showed some quality data with each burner.

      Optical storage reviews at www.cdrinfo.com does this.

  3. Strange things... by yuretz · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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?