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24x DVD Burners Hit the Market

KingofGnG writes "There is some uncertainty on which will be the one, between Sony Optiarc and Lite-On, to market the first drive of such kind, but the fact is that DVD burners will once again exceed the maximum write speed limit going from 22x to 24x. Both companies will release the new optical drives between March and May, and though in practice the speed difference isn't amazing at all, the new breakthrough shows that firms continue to invest in a technology with a surprisingly long life."

140 comments

  1. So last century! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Plz lower the cost of Blu-ray writers & media. Kthxbai!

    1. Re:So last century! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      Plz lower the cost of Blu-ray writers & media. Kthxbai!

      Pricewatch lists a 2x BDRE 25GB 15 Disc Spindle @ ~$115.00.

      15 * 25 = 375 GB
      Price per Gigabyte = $/GB = 115/375 = $0.30 per GB.

      Nothing to write home about yet, but at least it's coming down.

    2. Re:So last century! by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 2, Informative

      Ouch, still higher than HDDs.

    3. Re:So last century! by tomhudson · · Score: 1

      We'll see the same thing we saw with CDs ... price goes through the floor, speed goes up and up, and then they simply become obsolete.

      Same happened with zip drives ..

      Same happened with floppy drives ...

      Same is happening with DVD drives and, to a certain extent, with hard drives ...

    4. Re:So last century! by meatmanek · · Score: 5, Informative

      When CD-ROMs were new, most people's hard drives were a fraction of what could be held on a CD. The first computer my family had with a CD drive had a 250 meg hard drive. When you could start burning CDs for realistic prices, the average hard drive was probably a few gigabytes; you could back up all your data on two or three CDs.
      When DVD burners became available, hard drives were usually a few dozen GB; it took somewhere around 10 DVDs to back up all of your data.
      When Blu-ray burners became available, it wasn't uncommon for hard drives to be 500 GB, so 20 Blu-rays to back up your data.

      Yes, Blu-ray burners will become cheaper, and yes, blu-ray discs will become cheaper, but by the time they do, we'll be seeing 2 and 3TB hard drives for $100. The $/GB of Blu-ray might drop below hard drives for a while.

      Then, hard drives will continue to advance with Moore's law, and by the time the next generation of optical discs come out (which will probably be 150 GB/layer, based on the ~5x ratio of each disc type to the previous), you'll be able to buy 2-digit terabyte hard drives for $100.

      Conclusion: Blu-ray is already obsolete, at least for data archival. Hard drives are going to win for the next few years.

    5. Re:So last century! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Um, OK. Except I can buy an external hard drive for about $0.10/GB. Blu-ray will never be a decent option for data backup.

    6. Re:So last century! by tomhudson · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Exactly. You can already get an external 1.5 TB hd for $130.00 - between hard drives and solid-state devices, conventional rotating optical media are caught between a rock and a hard place. Time to switch to 3D encoding, or forget about it entirely.

    7. Re:So last century! by AmiMoJo · · Score: 1

      There are only really two reasons left to use optical media: playback on stand-alone players and archival.

      Playback is becoming less of an issue as network/usb capable players become available, but for a lot of people the simplicity of just inserting the relevant disc makes it worth the effort to burn one.

      Archival is less clear. In theory good quality DVD media stored properly should be readable in 10 or 20 years time. The problem is that no-one really knows for sure. HDDs might actually be a better option. I have HDDs from 20+ years ago that still work, although of course modern HDDs use very different technology so again it's largely an unknown. At least Seagate offer a 5 year warranty, so you can probably rely on a couple of offline mirrored HDDs for at least that long.

      --
      const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
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    8. Re:So last century! by drsquare · · Score: 1

      You're not supposed to archive data on optical disks anyway.

    9. Re:So last century! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Unless you are saving tons of music or video then your statement about using BluRay being obsolete for backups is drivel. Not everyone bothers backing up gigs of games, apps, os, when the data is the important part. I work with source code, office documents, a few pictures and design layouts. Those work out to maybe a couple gigs a year. I would like to think what I do is much more the common than whatever you are doing which generates terabytes of data a year.

    10. Re:So last century! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I work with source code, office documents, a few pictures and design layouts. Those work out to maybe a couple gigs a year. I would like to think what I do is much more the common than whatever you are doing which generates terabytes of data a year.

      Yes, I'm sure it's far more common to have several gigabytes of source code and design layouts than movies, music and games ... right? ;)

    11. Re:So last century! by tomhudson · · Score: 1

      At least Seagate offer a 5 year warranty, so you can probably rely on a couple of offline mirrored HDDs for at least that long.

      A bit optimistic ... I bought 2 seagates to do a raid1 - they were both defective, so I bought 2 more, and THEY were both defective. I'm on drives 12 through 14 (only one has lasted more than a week). It looks like ONE of those 3 is acceptable ...

  2. Moore's Law by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Why does Moore's Law not apply here?

    If hardware capability doubles every 18-24 months, shouldn't we be able to burn at 512X or some other ridiculously equivalent speed?

    1. Re:Moore's Law by doi · · Score: 4, Informative

      Because the disks fragment above a certain rotational speed. That's why you don't see 72x CD drives anymore. Go check Youtube you'll find plenty of examples.

      --
      A man's reach must exceed his grasp, or what's an erection for?
    2. Re:Moore's Law by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      For one thing, the drive can only spin the disc so fast...

    3. Re:Moore's Law by 0123456 · · Score: 5, Informative

      Why does Moore's Law not apply here?

      Because every time you double the rotation speed, you increase the force on the DVD by a factor of four; which means that before long the disk simply tears itself apart.

      In fact, I thought that was supposed to happen not much above 16x, so I'm surprised they've got it working this fast.

    4. Re:Moore's Law by Crookdotter · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I thought they would have a cool multi laser burner by now to up the write speed, or move the laser instead of the disc? You can build the laser stronger and rotate it at 10,000 rpm if you like.

    5. Re:Moore's Law by EvanED · · Score: 2, Informative

      Because Moore's law applies only to electronics (specifically, transistors) and not things with moving parts?

      That's not totally unlike asking "Why does Moore's Law not apply to cars?"

    6. Re:Moore's Law by evilviper · · Score: 4, Informative

      I thought they would have a cool multi laser burner by now to up the write speed

      Not likely. It's tricky enough having one laser doing "burn-free" and picking up where it left off... It's not going to happen with multiple laser, let alone improve speeds.

      or move the laser instead of the disc? You can build the laser stronger and rotate it at 10,000 rpm if you like.

      You can rotate the laser, but then you have MANY problems to address. Highly precise hinged wire harnesses, an extremely heavy rotating mount that can keep the laser perfectly steady, and continual centripetal compensation as the laser lens moves to focus the beam.

      It's possible, but very difficult.

      And no, you can't just rotate it at 10,000 RPMs. The laser mechanism won't take the force any better than the discs do. It's technically possible, but would be ludicrously expensive.

      And all for what? So you can buy one slightly faster disc burner, rather than hundreds of slightly slower disc burners, running in parallel.

      --
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    7. Re:Moore's Law by Grishnakh · · Score: 2, Interesting

      They tried that with CD readers long ago; I believe it was Kenwood CD-ROMs that had multiple lasers so different tracks could be read in parallel, allowing a higher bandwidth without having to rotate the disc any faster.

      It died after a while. It probably simply cost too much, and people just weren't willing to pay that much so they could read CDs faster, when dirt-cheap 24x drives are available.

    8. Re:Moore's Law by Jurily · · Score: 2, Informative

      Because every time you double the rotation speed, you increase the force on the DVD by a factor of four; which means that before long the disk simply tears itself apart.

      I vaguely remember a Mythbusters episode on that. The CD literally exploded, and the shrapnel left a big freaking dent in the aluminium casing they put it in.

    9. Re:Moore's Law by Man+On+Pink+Corner · · Score: 4, Interesting

      The faster the disc spins, the stronger the laser has to be. The lasers in DVD burners are already powerful enough to do real damage. There's probably some reluctance on manufacturers' part to hand out class-IV lasers for $29.99 with mail-in rebate.

    10. Re:Moore's Law by tomhudson · · Score: 5, Funny

      I've had a couple of CDs "explode" in 52x CD burners - one started to fail, so I forcibly ejected it w. a paperclip while it was still rotating - then quickly wished I hadn't. The next time one failed, I let it take the drive with it. Sounded like a mutant hamster running their exercise wheel to death.

    11. Re:Moore's Law by MooseMuffin · · Score: 1

      Why not just power down?

    12. Re:Moore's Law by scientus · · Score: 5, Insightful

      people dont understand that all moore's law said is that every 18 months the number of transistors would double. It did not say anything more. It has been widely overblown into an entire economic concept of technological markets and commodities that progress in exponential/logarithmic ways.

      Also, these things cannot suspend the laws of physics.

    13. Re:Moore's Law by electrosoccertux · · Score: 2, Interesting

      The shrapnel also buried itself 1" into the gelatin dummy (who had the same resistance to penetration [gotta be a better term for this but you get the point] as human flesh).

      IIRC, this occurred at ~300x.
      I think GP is a little wrong on the 16x thing. The limitation has been making a high enough powered laser to heat the bits to 200C in the split second the bit is being written.

    14. Re:Moore's Law by tomhudson · · Score: 1

      Once it starts to go, it goes FAST. We're talking just a couple of seconds. Once a disk starts to fragment into pieces, by the time you hit the big red power button it's probably already taken out the laser. The first one had a chunk out of one side missing, and lots of stress fractures radiating from the center hole. $100 later, new CD burner ... a year later, another disk from the same batch went while I was out of the room. Scratch another burner. Fortunately, by then DVD drives had dropped in price, so it was a good excuse to upgrade.

    15. Re:Moore's Law by Bozzio · · Score: 1

      How about just tilting a mirror?

      --
      I just pooped your party.
    16. Re:Moore's Law by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      "Why does Moore's Law not apply to cars?"

      It does if you apply a car analogy to electronics.

    17. Re:Moore's Law by penginkun · · Score: 1

      Also, these things cannot suspend the laws of physics.

      Where's Scotty when we need?

    18. Re:Moore's Law by digitalchinky · · Score: 1

      They give no warning they are going to shatter. All you get time for is the loud bang. You briefly wonder WTF it was. Look around, do a perfunctory check to see if your hamster is still in its wheel, and then discover your optical drive had some trouble.

    19. Re:Moore's Law by penginkun · · Score: 1

      Him. Where's Scotty when we need HIM.

      *sigh*

    20. Re:Moore's Law by Gregory+Arenius · · Score: 1

      I was always under the impression that the 72x CD drives managed the feat not by spinning it faster but by reading multiple tracks concurently. Here is a bit from on review on the drive:

      "Enter the technology developed by Zen. Instead of rotating the disc above and beyond the physical limits by some act of magic, they have devised a means to read seven tracks concurrently. Those seven streams of data flow through a specially designed RISC chip and to your computer with no additional CPU-load."

      Thats from:http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleid=339&page=2/

      They didn't use multiple lasers though they used some sort of prism to split one beam I believe. However they did it it wasn't very reliable and the Kenwood 72x drivers were notoriously unreliable as well as incompatible with many types of DRM. I believe Kenwood was the only manufacturer of CD drives of that speed and I believe they patented the technology. I think thats why no one else made drives that fast.

      Cheers,
      Greg

    21. Re:Moore's Law by ozmanjusri · · Score: 2, Funny

      Scattered over Puget Sound.

      --
      "I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
    22. Re:Moore's Law by mariushm · · Score: 2, Informative

      Well, in theory we could have 72x CD drives or even DVD drives, it's just that they're too expensive to make.

      A few years ago there was a company called Zen Research who invented a tehnology called TrueX which used 7 read heads to read the disc and it reconstructed the data from all seven read heads in the drive's cache.

      An actual CD-ROM drive that implemented this was Kenwood 72x (http://www.tweak3d.net/reviews/kenwood/72x/) but they chose to reduce the rotational speed instead of higher throughput (perhaps the processor that gathered data from those 7 heads was also too slow to allow faster speed).

      Nowadays, someone could probably license that technology and use it on DVD drives but the margins are so low already they wouldn't make a profit.

    23. Re:Moore's Law by BikeHelmet · · Score: 1

      http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleid=339&page=2

      Enter the technology developed by Zen. Instead of rotating the disc above and beyond the physical limits by some act of magic, they have devised a means to read seven tracks concurrently. Those seven streams of data flow through a specially designed RISC chip and to your computer with no additional CPU-load.

      The 72x CD drive is a lie. It's probably spinning at 40x speeds(or lower) - although as the sandra benchmarks show, if you have to read 7 tracks at once, it's way faster than any other drives out at the time.

    24. Re:Moore's Law by Eric+Smith · · Score: 1

      It's technically possible, but would be ludicrously expensive.

      It's not clear that it's even technically possible. Maybe if the mechanism was in a vacuum.

      Ludicrous speed! Go!

    25. Re:Moore's Law by sowth · · Score: 1

      You mean move the laser? Why not create an optical device to deflect the beam? I am out of practice, but it seems this would be far easier. Maybe there is some reason mfgrs don't do this (my guess would be a patent holder wants huge fees), but I am sure you could achieve much higher speeds than physically spinning the disc or laser.

    26. Re:Moore's Law by udif · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Actually, it was a single laser that was split into multiple beams.

      The technology behind the Kenwood drives was developed by an Israeli startup called Zen Research (they had their logo on the drive).

      The drive ended up more expensive than it had to, because they ended up using separate ICs for each beam due to a bug in their ASIC, preventing using the ASIC's internal logic that was supposed to do the same. They were already very late so they didn't respin the ASIC.

      They worked on the same logic for a DVD writer, but they were so late that the company went belly-up.

    27. Re:Moore's Law by kristinuk21 · · Score: 1

      ooo..but there is... check this http://www.storextechnologies.com/index.html i wanted this slashdoted from some time now...maybe they will release something.

    28. Re:Moore's Law by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      WIN.

    29. Re:Moore's Law by Haley's+Comet · · Score: 1

      Holy shit, I just swallowed my chewing tobacco!

      --
      The Illuminati would kill me, but I'm not rich enough to take notice of.
    30. Re:Moore's Law by PyroMosh · · Score: 2, Interesting

      If I remember correctly, Mythbusters had to use rotational speeds that were several times what a real drive will do. 300x or so?

      One night my girlfriend were sitting at our PCs, which were right next to each other. We heard a very loud, very sudden bang or pop noise out of nowhere. Looked at each other, and looked around the room and couldn't figure out what that noise was.

      When we couldn't figure out what that loud noise was, we forgot about it, and figured that if it was important, we'd find it eventually. So we went back to what we were doing.

      She was starting up a game of StarCraft, and finally noticed that the game had failed to load, giving an error message about being unable to read the CD.

      She tried again. It was then that it dawned on me what that noise might had been. I had certainly *heard* of optical discs exploding, but had not had it happen to me, nor anyone I personally knew.

      Here's what was left, when I removed her drive:

      http://pyromosh.org/images/misc/Broodwar_CD_explosion/

      The drive was indeed hosed, as you might expect. But no shrapnel ever escaped the drive, nor even made a visible impact on the drive casing.

    31. Re:Moore's Law by SimonTheSoundMan · · Score: 1

      A little shame that 10,000 RPM would result in a 20x burner.

      A 52x burner spins at 26,000 RPM.

      For the record, I have had a new disc shatter while reading. It was a 52x reader, it managed to puncture a hole through the side of my aluminium CoolerMaster case.

    32. Re:Moore's Law by TheRaven64 · · Score: 1

      It might work for reading, but would be almost impossible for writing. The problem is that CDs were designed for playing music, not for storing data, and DVDs picked up this stupidity. Tracks on hard (and floppy) disks are concentric circles, meaning that you can skip to the correct one easily because you know the exact distance from the center. Tracks in CDs are spirals. Writing two sets of concentric circles independently is easy. Writing two parts of a spiral independently is incredibly hard. You might have noticed that seek times on DVDs are horrendous compared to hard disks at similar rotation rates (by around three orders of magnitude, sometimes four). This is a result of the same thing; that you have to guess roughly where the track will be and then scan ahead until you find a track and follow it until you find the one you actually wanted.

      --
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    33. Re:Moore's Law by TheRaven64 · · Score: 1

      Actually, Moore's paper proposed a complex relationship between time, cost, and number of transistors. You can use it in both dimensions, to predict the cost of a certain number of transistors in a given year.

      --
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    34. Re:Moore's Law by Lumpy · · Score: 1

      Even 1X burners have the bit in the burn windows for a "split second" the problem is the faster you spin the more sloppy the burn looks. Take a CDR or DVDR and put it under a microscope to look. All DVD's I sell to customers are burned at 2X and no faster, they look clean compared to the smeared look of the 4X and 8X and higher DVD-R's that get burned. I also eliminated all defective disk complaints by doing that.

      The faster yuo burn the more "sloppy" the burning is on the disk.

      --
      Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
    35. Re:Moore's Law by scientus · · Score: 1

      not really, it stated that the more transistors are on a chip the cheaper that chip is to produce, but that also the more likely that chip would be bad. As technologies progressed, mechanisms for increasing the yield would keep going up, so that more and more transistors could fit on each individual chip, thereby lowering costs, and increasing performance. The number of transistors was speculated eventually to be 18 months, which for the time seems optimistic, but turned to be about right.

    36. Re:Moore's Law by joshtheitguy · · Score: 1

      There's probably some reluctance on manufacturers' part to hand out class-IV lasers for $29.99 with mail-in rebate.

      This reminded me of an article I read a couple of months ago (http://lifehacker.com/287252/turn-a-flashlight-into-a-handheld-burning-laser) which might just happen to show why they would be reluctant to hand out said class-IV lasers.

    37. Re:Moore's Law by Tubal-Cain · · Score: 1

      The faster yuo burn the more "sloppy" the burning is on the disk.

      The same could be said of typing...

    38. Re:Moore's Law by Tetsujin · · Score: 1

      You mean move the laser? Why not create an optical device to deflect the beam? I am out of practice, but it seems this would be far easier.

      Seems to me there's two issues with that:

      First, there's a precision issue, and a related reliability issue. If you're adjusting the laser (and sensor) angle using a rotating mirror, for instance, a small change in the mirror position corresponds to a relatively large change in the read position. The reliability issue is the increased probability that such a device would become misaligned, due to its higher sensitivity.

      Second, for the laser to have a fairly perpendicular angle of incidence to the disc surface by deflecting the beam would ordinarily require a fairly large distance between the deflecting device and the surface of the disc. If the angle isn't kept close enough to perpendicular, this can result in greater degrees of refraction and parallax in trying to read a bit.

      --
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    39. Re:Moore's Law by Tubal-Cain · · Score: 1

      If I remember correctly, Mythbusters had to use rotational speeds that were several times what a real drive will do. 300x or so?

      How new/high quality were the discs they were testing? A disc coming from a fresh cakebox is likely to do better than an old disc.

    40. Re:Moore's Law by theelectron · · Score: 1

      a year later, another disk from the same batch went while I was out of the room.

      Methinks, you may have wanted to examine the quality of the cds you are using instead of the speed of the cd rom...

    41. Re:Moore's Law by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I tried doing that, but failed miserably on the part where you solder the laser to the flashlight. I have installed mod chips and done other such hard-to-solder things, but this was next to impossible. By the time I was ready to give up, the pins on the laser diode were salvageable. If I had to do it again, I would definitely recommend soldering flexible wires to the laser then to the batteries instead of directly via thicker solid wires.

    42. Re:Moore's Law by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Because the disks fragment above a certain rotational speed.

      Isn't that what Microsoft defrag is for?

  3. Standards do that... by Darkness404 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    the new breakthrough shows that firms continue to invest in a technology with a surprisingly long life."

    Hm, you mean that people are surprised that people would continue to invest in a technology that is the only standard* advanced optical disk? With memory capabilities that are good enough for most people (high def movies aside, DVDs have enough storage for just about everything) and the fact that any successors still are too expensive for most people? Wow, so surprising!

    *Yes, Blu-Ray is as much of a standard as DVD is, but most computers do not have Blu-Ray and even most newer computers leave off Blu-Ray drives as do all Macs.

    --
    Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
    1. Re:Standards do that... by tomhudson · · Score: 4, Insightful

      DVDs have enough storage for just about everything

      They're obsolete. If a stack of DVDs are good enough to back up your full hard drive, your hard drive is either also obsolete, almost empty, or it's a flash drive.

      Nobody's going to burn almost dvds to back up a $90 1 TB hard drive.

    2. Re:Standards do that... by Darkness404 · · Score: 1

      I have found there is little use for full drive backups for a few reasons. A) All of my music is transfered to my iPod so already there is double redundancy B) All my pictures are also on various memory cards C) I use Linux so restoring all my OS minus the data that is already backed up is trivial D) A home directory backup is all that is ever necessary. And so yes, all that other stuff does fit within 4 gigs of space, perhaps I just don't have a lot of files, but also most of the people who I have done computer work for have similarly few files.

      --
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    3. Re:Standards do that... by tomhudson · · Score: 1

      Installing the OS isn't the problem with linux, it's all the updates, which isn't so trivial.

      Also, you forgot to back up /etc, /srv, and /var, as well as /usr/local. Hope you weren't running any databases, local copies of web apps, an svn repository, etc.

    4. Re:Standards do that... by Darkness404 · · Score: 1

      Actually, as I do none of the above, no data would have been lost. And while it is true about the updates, as I use Ubuntu there is a new version every 6 months, meaning that at most I have to install about 5 months worth of updates which isn't so bad considering my HDs don't fail every 6 months.

      --
      Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
    5. Re:Standards do that... by berend+botje · · Score: 1

      My home directory is currently just over 170 gigs. And that's only because I regularly purge old records.

    6. Re:Standards do that... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Nobody's going to burn almost dvds to back up a $90 1 TB hard drive.

      I think you accidentally a word.

    7. Re:Standards do that... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      All the movies, music, and porn you pirate are still freely available on the Internet and thus don't need local backups.

    8. Re:Standards do that... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      They're obsolete. If a stack of DVDs are good enough to back up your full hard drive, your hard drive is either also obsolete, almost empty, or it's a flash drive.

      I still do my backups to DVDs, by the simple technique of separating hard-drive-filling-spam from things I actually need to back up.

      I've been on google mail for years, but only accumulated 500 megabytes of mail. Easy enough to back that up. I've done plenty of programming and design... but not more than a few gigabytes of files. I take digital photos, but not more than a few gigabytes a year.

      Now, it's true that if I wanted to back up everything on my hard drive, like installed software; downloaded games from Steam; DVDs I've ripped to copy to my eee and watch on the train; videos captured from MiniDV tapes; and the bulky data sets generated by my scientific equipment; I would indeed need a large number of DVDs. However, it wouldn't be hard to replace or recreate that data. So I barely need to back it up.

      So, yeah, that's how I back up my hard drive to DVDs - by only generating data in compact formats, and only backing up data I have generated. Admittedly, my approach won't work for everyone, but it works for me.

    9. Re:Standards do that... by shoptroll · · Score: 1

      It's not like Blu-Ray is going to be a good alternative either.

      --
      Insert Sig Here
    10. Re:Standards do that... by MBGMorden · · Score: 1

      And so yes, all that other stuff does fit within 4 gigs of space, perhaps I just don't have a lot of files, but also most of the people who I have done computer work for have similarly few files.

      That's not the norm for most people I know. Most of them will break 4 gigs easily on just music. I already know several people buying TV shows off iTunes now and those alone for the hi-def versions are close to 1GB per episode.

      Hell my PERSONAL data beyond OS is well over a terabyte now. I know I'm not the norm, but PLENTY of people are still well past a few DVD's for backing up all their data. Not to mention that with time the number of people in the group, and their total data storage needs, will definitely go up.

      --
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    11. Re:Standards do that... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      "already there is double redundancy"

      The Redundant Department of Redundant Redundancy wants to talk with you. Twice.

    12. Re:Standards do that... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      wow. this must be the first time in slashdot history that there is a significant percentage of people who hold the opinion that dvd/blueray/any optical media is obsolete. this took, what, some 10 years for an average slashdotter to realize. shame on you, guys.

    13. Re:Standards do that... by Reziac · · Score: 1

      Last time I did a backup to DVD, I went thru an entire 100-unit spindle. At which point I decided this was for the birds. The fact is, reasonably-priced and consumer-friendly backup methods just don't keep up with data volume, and never have. :(

      The current answer seems to be multiple HDs of similar size -- fortunately current pricing makes that a more attractive alternative. But they still lack durable-portability, in that if you drop that backup HD, it may well be headcrashed and therefore toast (or at least pricey to recover your data). Flash drives should fix that issue, but they're still too expensive if you've got multiple terabytes of data to back up.

      --
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  4. DVDs are here to stay by A12m0v · · Score: 1

    Just like CDs they are still popular and relevant. I'm personally not too excited about BD and seems the market is equally not excited.
    It took the now cheaper more ubiquitous USB flash to kill floppy disks. I remember them still being in fashion 5 years ago. And it will be long before a USB flash becomes a metaphor for saving.

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    1. Re:DVDs are here to stay by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      And it will be long before a USB flash becomes a metaphor for saving.

      Woah, I had totally filtered that out. I had to go and check to confirm that it actually still is a floppy disk... that's crazy. Are there any alternatives that have worked?

    2. Re:DVDs are here to stay by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I had filtered it out as well, but it makes sense, after all, USB flash drives don't have a standard look, and those more or less plain ones (like the usual kingston ones) aren't particularly easy to identify if the shape is simplified.

    3. Re:DVDs are here to stay by AmiMoJo · · Score: 1

      Flash memory might actually be a much better format than even BluRay for both movies and backup/archival.

      Many BluRay players have a USB port now, and 16GB flash drives are in the sub 4000 yen ($40?) range now. For backup, flash seems like it's probably quite a reliant format (largely immune to thinks like magnetic fields, temperature, water etc) and although many manufacturers list a 10 year data retention time, that is without re-writing the data which "refreshes" it.

      --
      const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
      SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
  5. 24x is nice but... by VampireByte · · Score: 1, Funny

    ... the question isn't whether the LiteOn or Sony is first but will either run on Vista?

    Sorry, it just had to be asked.

    --

    Run and catch, run and catch, the lamb is caught in the blackberry patch.

  6. make bad discs faster by frovingslosh · · Score: 5, Insightful

    What surprises me is that people still buy into this bad idea. While I really wish that I really could burn quality discs at high speed, I've learned the hard way that the higher the burn speed, the worse the quality of the burn. I don't care how fast a burner will burn a disc, I never burn faster than 4x. It took me a long time to convince myself that there was really any problem with high speed burns, after all, if these knowable manufacturers like Sony and Lite-on make the drives they must be good, right? But I've come to find that just isn't the case. Fortunately for the manufacturers, discs usually contain as much as 20% error recovery data, and this error recovery data can hide marginal burns. But I don't want error recovery information covering up bad burns, I want good burns in the first place, and I want that error recovery information to be available to correct later fine scratches, deteriorating optics, differences in the optics between drives, and just plain old "bit rot". You give that up when you burn at high speed, and in some cases the disk may not work at all, even if it passed a "verification" pass from the burning software.

    I wish this wasn't the case, I really do. I've dome thousands of burns and the combined time increase to do those at low speed is not insignificant. But I've seen way too many problems from high speed burns that can be avoided completely by simply doing low speed burns. It is far better to take 15 minutes and get a good burn than to rush the burn in a couple of minutes but maybe have problems with it immediately, but even worse to have problems with it after the original data has been deleted and you find that you can no longer read the high speed burn.

    --
    I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
    1. Re:make bad discs faster by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Er... I've been using a 12x Creative writer for at least 8 years now, and I've never had a single problem. I'm pretty sure you can try upping your write speed.

    2. Re:make bad discs faster by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Read other comments and you'll find that his experience isn't unique. Of course he can look for the right combination of drive and discs and make test runs to find the highest reliable speed. What for? It's a fragile system: When the drive breaks, he probably can't get the same model as a replacement. When the disc brand changes the manufacturer or the manufacturer changes the process (both happens frequently), the consumer would have to detect that and rerun the tests. 4x speed is the highest reliable speed which works pretty much regardless of drive and disc. Everything else is marketing and pushing one's luck.

    3. Re:make bad discs faster by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      But I've seen way too many problems from high speed burns that can be avoided completely by simply doing low speed burns. It is far better to take 15 minutes and get a good burn than to rush the burn in a couple of minutes but maybe have problems with it immediately, but even worse to have problems with it after the original data has been deleted and you find that you can no longer read the high speed burn.

      This sentence gave me a headache.

    4. Re:make bad discs faster by adolf · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Luck?

      Back in the day (a decade or so ago), I was the first kid on the block with an 8x Plextor SCSI CD burner. It was the fastest available at the time, aside from one released by Smart and Friendly just a few weeks earlier.

      In the beginning, media was indeed a problem. A lot of blanks were still branded for 2x, most of them were 4x, and only a few were actually rated at 8x. Some had real issues, others seemed to work ok. After a semi-intensive study of different media, I found that silver (yes, silver - not aluminum) TDK Certified+ seemed to work the best in general. I had the impression at the time that such trial-and-error sessions were common at the time.

      As time moved on, media improved, as did the firmware on the drive. Eventually, within a year or two of folks improving their CD-R chemistry and Plextor improving the firmware, the situation improved enough that I was able to buy whatever blanks were cheapest at Wal-Mart. Things always worked very well, and I never bothered much with burning below 8x.

      Now: I can go back and read these decade-old disks, and they still work fine. I don't bother very often (after all, who wants to use an old backup of 98SE, or OS/2 Warp Connect Blue?), but whenever I do, things are good.

      I'm really not sure what the problem is.

    5. Re:make bad discs faster by mesterha · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I've also never had a problem with CDs, but the issue is with DVDs. DVDs are much worse, presumably because of the higher data density.

      --

      Chris Mesterharm
    6. Re:make bad discs faster by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I had an internal PATA Sony DRU-500AX and a few models after that, I'm now on a USB LG GSA-E40L. I currently burn at 12x and do a verify on all burns. The very few coasters I've had were due to visible problems with the media. I can do 16x if I'm not doing anything else, but if I can burn thousands (not joking) of DVDs at 12X on USB, i think you're ok.

    7. Re:make bad discs faster by AmiMoJo · · Score: 2, Interesting

      It isn't as simple as higher speed = poorer burn quality.

      Check out CD Freaks, they have a lot of data on this sort of thing. For example, my Pioneer 16x DVD drive only burns 12x on most media, but a 12x burn is always better quality than an 8x burn. The method the drive uses to get 12x is simply better than the one it uses to get 8x, so on that drive burning at 12x is best.

      This is quite often the case, as manufacturers tend to spend more time improving the maximum burn speeds for common media, rather than worrying about how well the 8x burn speed that no-one uses does. Chances are the 8x mode is inherited from older drives, and not state of the art like the 12x mode.

      --
      const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
      SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
    8. Re:make bad discs faster by QuantumPion · · Score: 1

      I hear that using a platinum-iridium SATA cable by Monster for the low low price of $3800/in reduces the number of burning errors and increases the lifespan of your burned media too.

  7. Who cares? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    So this save like, what, 3 seconds burning a disc? Unless you're producing 100 copies of something, this is so inconsequential it's beneath Slashdot to even think about it let alone post it.

    1. Re:Who cares? by DurendalMac · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Precisely. There are already 22x burners on the market. Hell, most DVD-R discs don't go above 16x anyway. What a yawn of a story.

    2. Re:Who cares? by Rocketship+Underpant · · Score: 1

      I suppose it's worth it if you're burning discs all day for your job, just like you might find it worth your while to choose one computer over another because its CPU is 10% faster.

      --
      He who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.
    3. Re:Who cares? by TheRaven64 · · Score: 1

      Producing 100 copies of something is about the only thing I've used my DVD burners for. My last two laptops have come with them, and I've used them for burning lots of copies of video editing projects for distributing to people, but I've never used them as a mechanism for data transfer. With USB flash drives so cheap and convenient, I doubt I will. If UDF write support had been added to mainstream operating systems sooner, so you could use CDs and DVDs like floppy disks, then it might have been different.

      --
      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
  8. I burn DVDs at 4x by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    that is, if I burn DVDs at all. I could never get reliable burns at higher speeds and the delay just doesn't matter. The computer does it all in the background. Hard disk space is cheaper than DVD space. The only reason for DVDs is that it's safer to keep important data duplicated on different kinds of media.

    1. Re:I burn DVDs at 4x by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

      Hard disk space is cheaper than DVD space.

      Absolutely not true.

      1.5 TB hard drive - $130
      300x 4.7 GB DVD-Rs - $54

      Even allowing for an extra 100 pack of DVDs to make up the difference, DVD-Rs are still half the cost/GB of hard drives.

    2. Re:I burn DVDs at 4x by Dogtanian · · Score: 1

      Is a 1.5TB drive the fairest comparison? I can't be arsed looking up the figures, but aren't 500GB - 1TB drives still the sweet point in bytes-per-buck? It's only recently that 1.5TB models were at the top end in terms of size (and with the accompanying premium).

      --
      "Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
    3. Re:I burn DVDs at 4x by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It depends on your location. Around here it's 40EUR for 100 DVD+Rs, so I would get about 800GB of DVD space for the price of a 1TB hard disk. Since I don't use DVDs very often (and would find shuffling 300 discs very inconvenient), I don't buy them in those kind of quantities anyway.

    4. Re:I burn DVDs at 4x by packeteer · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Even if a stack of DVDs and a hard drive were the exact same price per gigabyte you would still want to have the hard drive. The hard drive offers considerable more value than a stack of DVDs that cannot the average seek time of any random data is about a minute as you have to find the disc, load the disc, and so on.

      As it stands now if you want to backup large chunks of data such as an entire HD then you should not be going with DVDs. If you want to backup DVDs or small files then DVDs are fine.

      --
      unzip; strip; touch; finger; mount; fsck; more; yes; unmount; sleep
    5. Re:I burn DVDs at 4x by wssddc · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Absolutely not true.

      1.5 TB hard drive - $130
      300x 4.7 GB DVD-Rs - $54

      Even allowing for an extra 100 pack of DVDs to make up the difference, DVD-Rs are still half the cost/GB of hard drives.

      If you want convenient access to your DVD-Rs, you'll want individual cases. These cost slightly more than the disks. Then you'll need a storage shelf and maybe some labels. Add these costs and DVDs and hards disks are roughly equal.

    6. Re:I burn DVDs at 4x by Zerth · · Score: 1

      Prices on 1.5TB have dropped like a rock. They are, in units/dollar, cheaper than .5TB, slightly cheaper than 1TB, and roughly equal to .75TB.

      Actually, I just picked up some 1.5TB on sale for 10 bucks over the 1TB cost. Either I'm about to suffer an early warranty replacement, or the incremental cost between the .75, 1 and 1.5 is only due to testing/grading performance like the various CPU/GPU chips that can be downgraded to fit the market demand.

    7. Re:I burn DVDs at 4x by Zerth · · Score: 1

      And an automatic disc-changer. If I'm going to be swapping 300+(don't forget coasters) discs any more frequently than once a year, I want a robot to do it for me.

      One of my relatives bought one, slightly used, to burn training DVDs and it is awesome(if really damn heavy).

      Shameless plug for the pyros, his second DVD on how to make fire covers a bunch of usually impractical ways to make fire: the fire plow(a la Castaway), various electrical, lots of chemical, and lenses(including jello & ice).

      The first one covers methods of making fire that might actually be useful in the wilderness, but I imagine everyone here already knows them.

    8. Re:I burn DVDs at 4x by WuphonsReach · · Score: 1

      Prices on 1.5TB have dropped like a rock. They are, in units/dollar, cheaper than .5TB, slightly cheaper than 1TB, and roughly equal to .75TB.

      You mean the 1.5TB Seagates which are now notorious for being flaky drives?

      Personally, I'm using 1TB drives from diff manufs (Samsungs seem to be a bit flaky) and waiting for the 2TB drives to be available from multiple manufs.

      --
      Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?
  9. Catch-up! by tomm3h · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I really wish they'd start investing in dragging the cost of next-generation media down. Blu-Ray is great if you ignore the DRM aspects.. Which for data backup renders it perfectly adequate.

    Though I'd much rather see something with a little more than 50GB of storage... But then, if they spent their R&D money on perfecting/improving the multi-layer technology, we'd all be backing-up to n*25GB discs in no time.

    Why waste all the research budget on ageing technology, when it takes a whole spindle of DVD-Rs to back-up my 2TB RAID array?

    1. Re:Catch-up! by TheGratefulNet · · Score: 1

      you cannot ignore the drm in BD. each drive, blank (etc) contains an 'I ok this' vote to sony.

      I DO NOT OK THIS!

      so I won't buy BD. I don't condone the whole BD double-protection thing and each time you buy, you send the wrong message to sony.

      boycott bad standards. I know, you like storage but this isn't the only way to have density.

      --

      --
      "It is now safe to switch off your computer."
    2. Re:Catch-up! by TrancePhreak · · Score: 1

      You can get a hard drive and back it up for cheaper and at faster speeds. Plus it is likely (if you go USB) that you will be able to take it with you to any computer without the need to check for blu-ray.

      --

      -]Phreak Out[-
    3. Re:Catch-up! by Rocketship+Underpant · · Score: 1

      Sony and the other Japanese companies will get on this eventually. You can already buy writeable Blu-Ray discs at most Japanese convenience stores for about $9.

      --
      He who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.
    4. Re:Catch-up! by tomm3h · · Score: 1

      To be fair, it doesn't have to be BD. I'd take anything with better density, so long as it's relable.

      But it was interesting to read the other replies to your post, about CD and DVD encoding. :)

    5. Re:Catch-up! by tomm3h · · Score: 1

      You can get a hard drive and back it up for cheaper and at faster speeds. Plus it is likely (if you go USB) that you will be able to take it with you to any computer without the need to check for blu-ray.

      I don't currently back up to a hard drive and stick it in my drawer... I back up important data to CD/DVD/.

      Backing up to a HDD each time is expensive compared to the cost that a few discs should run to. The problem is that next-gen optical storage isn't cheap enough yet.

    6. Re:Catch-up! by mattack2 · · Score: 1

      Presumably you mean rewritable discs. At the moment, the cheapest BD-RE discs, at least available through Amazon seems to be about $7.87 apiece.
      http://www.amazon.com/Memorex-32020013366-Rewriteable-Blu-Ray-Spindle/dp/B001B98F3I

      (I keep hoping eventually a standalone video recorder will show up with BluRay in it -- or at least a convenient way to put recordings from a Tivo on BluRay.)

  10. Writable DVD is trash anyways by gweihir · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Even DVD-RAM is not very good, as I found hwen evaluating 6 different media. I have no diea what people use these for, but backup, data storage and data exchange are all very bad ideas in this consumer-trash. Writing trash faster makes in not better at all.

    --
    Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
    1. Re:Writable DVD is trash anyways by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

      If your post is anything to go by, maybe the data wasn't corrupted, maybe you just didn't spell anything write in the first place.

    2. Re:Writable DVD is trash anyways by antdude · · Score: 1

      How about DVD-RW and DVD+RW? I would love to use those dual layer types so I can reuse the media like the old disks and CD-RW days.

      --
      Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
    3. Re:Writable DVD is trash anyways by Jeff+DeMaagd · · Score: 1

      I don't know what sort of problems that you dealt with, but I haven't had a problem writing DVDs that some people seem to.

      But I too am not so concerned about how quickly data can be burned, I usually write at a rate a lot slower than the max the media is rated for. I haven't bought fancy high quality media, but I didn't buy any store brand media either. I haven't had anyone tell me that a disc I give them is unreadable.

      I just tried a couple pieces of the oldest DVD writables that I could find, a six year old DVD+RW and five year old DVD-RW and their data is still 100% intact, without errors or rereads.

    4. Re:Writable DVD is trash anyways by TheRaven64 · · Score: 1

      The media you use makes a huge difference. The first spindle I bought had about a 10% success rate. They all appeared to burn correctly, but then failed to verify. With the same burner, the second spindle I bought worked perfectly until I'd burned about 5 disks and the drive had heated up. Leaving it to cool for ten minutes made it work again.

      --
      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
    5. Re:Writable DVD is trash anyways by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

      --- Begin irony ---

      maybe you just didn't spell anything write in the first place.

      -- End irony ---

    6. Re:Writable DVD is trash anyways by mattack2 · · Score: 1

      What do you mean by "not very good"?

      I like some aspects of DVD-RAM for video use (i.e. essentially videotape replacement), though admittedly because of loading times in my consumer level hard drive/DVD recorder, I have been using DVD-RW more often. But reading the wikipedia about DVD-RAM and its purported higher reliability is interesting:
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dvd-ram

  11. What about Media? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I've yet to see even 22x DVD-R's or DVD+R's. Well, at least on Newegg. And I'll guess the price on it will be 3 times the price of the 16x DVD's.

  12. Optical disks are unlikely to ever again catch up by iYk6 · · Score: 1

    If you have 2 TB you need to back up, then optical media is not the right solution. You need another array of disks (or a single disk), and rsync (or something similar). Optical media might be a good solution for you to back up only your more important files. If they are all more important, then it just won't work well. I remember when CDs were almost as big as my hard drive, but those days are over.

  13. Re:Optical disks are unlikely to ever again catch by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Youngin'. I remember when my harddrive was half the size of a CD-R. I still have it too. Excellent paperweight.

  14. Disc error rates by flyingfsck · · Score: 1

    Maybe with new 24x drives we may finally be able to burn a disk at more than 4x speed and get a disc that works.

    --
    Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
    1. Re:Disc error rates by TrancePhreak · · Score: 1

      This sounds like a computer speed issue... Older computers are not able to keep up with the burns and thus the cache is emptied and you get an error.

      --

      -]Phreak Out[-
  15. Get off my lawn... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Ah, I used to dream about having a harddrive half the size of a CD-R.

    1. Re:Get off my lawn... by iYk6 · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I remember when I had two 40 MB hard drives (this was before CDs). My Dad told me stories about people with 200 MB hard drives, and I wondered what they could possibly do with all that extra space.

    2. Re:Get off my lawn... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      My IBM PS/2 had a 20Mb hard disk, 1Mb of RAM and a 6Mhz 286 processor. And get of my lawn.

    3. Re:Get off my lawn... by TheRaven64 · · Score: 1

      My first PC had a 40MB hard disk, and at the time my father's company still had a machine with a full height (i.e. twice as tall as a CD drive) 5.25" hard disk, with a massive 5MB of space, running iRMX. It's a shame RMX never really caught on outside of embedded systems. If IBM had used it instead of DOS then the computing landscape today would be very different.

      --
      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
  16. Feh by moniker127 · · Score: 1

    If you need physical media, flash drives are by far superior anyway. I ONLY use dvds for boot devices nowadays.

    1. Re:Feh by tepples · · Score: 2, Insightful

      If you need physical media, flash drives are by far superior anyway.

      Unless you want to play video on someone's SDTV. Then you need either a DVD player and a DVD burner, or a high-end DVD/DivX player with a USB port, or a PC with a $50 S-Video adapter.

    2. Re:Feh by adolf · · Score: 1

      Bah.

      I used to have low-end RCA DVD player. It upscaled to 1080i via HDMI, it played random DIVX and MPEG movies from flash, and it worked well with every TV I ever connected it to. Video quality was good -- I kept it around until I got a PS3 and wanted to decrease the number of components next to the TV.

      It was $50 at Wal-Mart.

      It doesn't have to be high-end.

    3. Re:Feh by TheRaven64 · · Score: 1

      That's pretty much the only thing I've ever used a DVD burner for; burning videos I've edited for playback without a computer. As a removable media format for general data use, it failed. For small files (under 50MB or so globally, under a few GB locally) a network is more convenient. For larger files, flash drives are more convenient.

      --
      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
    4. Re:Feh by tepples · · Score: 1

      I used to have low-end RCA DVD player. It upscaled to 1080i via HDMI, it played random DIVX and MPEG movies from flash, and it [...] was $50 at Wal-Mart.

      At this point, I'm almost jealous that you found the right make and model. Is it still made?

    5. Re:Feh by HungWeiLo · · Score: 1

      Costco has a Philips DVP5592 player that is DivX-certified, has a USB2.0 port, and upscales to 1080p via HDMI. $40 over Thanksgiving, and it's $50 now.

      I plug a external 300GB hard drive to it. That's over 400 movies @ 700MB each. They look decently enough even on my 46" plasma.

      Can't wait until the BD players come down in price so I can play my h264's without a PC.

      --
      There are a huge number of yeast infections in this county. Probably because we're downriver from the bread factory.
    6. Re:Feh by acohen1 · · Score: 0

      Or you can use a PC that already supports s-video, like every pc I've owned in the past decade, including laptops. Even so, $50 is less than the burner drive and a spindle of 50 discs. Not to mention wasted time burning things.

    7. Re:Feh by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      And I assume you are willing to lug that thing around when you want to watch those videos on someone else's television? It is much easier to carry even 10 DVDs than an entire DVD player plus all the cables you might need (HDMI, Component, Composite, and Coax).

    8. Re:Feh by adolf · · Score: 1

      Doubt it. It's been at least two years since I bought that player, and given that it seemed to be a Wal-Mart exclusive, I'd be really surprised if it's still available.

      As another poster suggested, though: The player I used before that was a Philips model. It was more money (about $90), but it was a little fancier and a couple of years prior to the RCA that I had. It also worked fine with whatever media, as long as I stuffed it onto disc first (it had no support for USB or flash).

      IIRC, it had some nomenclature on the box which said something like "Plays everything!@#$!!!!!", and as far as I could tell, that was pretty much accurate. I'd expect current Philips models with that make similar claims to perform similarly.

      Good luck!

  17. Kenwood TrueX 72x by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    In 2000 we had a Kenwood 72x TrueX cd-rom. It had multiple beams. I think it was $130 new, the 52x one was about $80, I think this is back when a normal 52x cd-rom would put you out of $40.

    I have the 52x version sitting on a shelf. When it worked it was fast, but it was limited by the medium as any problems encountered would send it in to 1x read speeds, which happened quite a bit. This was with retail CDs too. With burned disks, assuming it recognized them, it actually took more time to read than a regular cd-rom.

    It was a neat idea though.

    1. Re:Kenwood TrueX 72x by owlstead · · Score: 1

      A very fast DVD reader would be brilliant for my current way of using CD's and DVD's : copy them to drive (removing any constraints) and playing the media later on. I have a hick up free experience and I safe battery life. They could even make one that was very fast but could not do searching; just rip the whole thing to drive already, I'll use a virtual DVD or CD-ROM if required...

  18. these sentences, not this sentence by frovingslosh · · Score: 1

    This sentence gave me a headache.

    You quoted two sentences, not one. Are you trying to make things look worse than they are? Is a compound sentence really that hard for your brain?

    --
    I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
  19. DVD has Sony patents too by tepples · · Score: 1

    you cannot ignore the drm in BD. each drive, blank (etc) contains an 'I ok this' vote to sony.

    So did Compact Disc (at least until the patents ran out). CD uses EFM encoding in the physical layer, and DVD uses a minor improvement on EFM.

    1. Re:DVD has Sony patents too by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Interesting, also I'd never heard of it's inventor before. Kees A. Schouhamer Immink. That's one impressive dude.

  20. Re:Optical disks are unlikely to ever again catch by Drinking+Bleach · · Score: 1

    When I had a 400MB hard disk, I had a tape drive and a 512MB tape to back up the entire hard disk. The system also had a (read only) CD drive, which made two removable media options for me that had larger capacity than my actual hard disk could contain.

    How times have changed!

  21. Dual Layer instead of 24x(!) by Ilgaz · · Score: 1

    If you watch burn process in Roxio Toast, you will be even more surprised. If you set it to max speed like 16x, it hits 16x only at certain parts (I guess the end) of DVD-R, not the entire process is 16x. It shows the live speed of burning, I guess Windows Nero does too.

    If this thing mentioned requires special disks, they will be expensive as hell just like DVD-R DL, it really hurts to see DVD dual layer price while all your drives are dual layer capable and you have files/movies to burn.

    They should have invested in Dual Layer technology, making it cheaper and reliable as the problem is NOT the burning speed, it is the obsolete DVD-R with 6-7 GB single files wondering around. What about Blu-Ray you may ask... Well, with that idiot Sony managed to make even Apple, the World famous early adopter afraid from adding it. When you buy DVD enabled computer, you expect it to play commercial movies. It is not the case in OS X BluRay scene. So, Apple won't put it and handle all the swearing, trolling etc. and they certainly won't make OS X like Vista, DRM checking whole chain all the time just in case DVD Jon codes decss for blu-ray.

  22. 24X? Wow... by Tetsujin · · Score: 1

    I guess people are making seriously hardcore DVDs with this thing. I mean, most of my DVDs are just three X's, which is plenty for my needs...

    --
    Bow-ties are cool.
  23. Re:Roger Moore's Law by Tetsujin · · Score: 1

    Because Moore's law applies only to electronics (specifically, transistors) and not things with moving parts?

    That's not totally unlike asking "Why does Moore's Law not apply to cars?"

    Probably there was a time when cars followed a similar pattern of growth...

    Moore's Law seems to work specifically because it's applied to a field that presently has a lot of untapped potential. Processes can continue to be refined, the market for the devices continues to grow, and as yet the limits on either haven't quite been hit.

    --
    Bow-ties are cool.
  24. Read speed? by acohen1 · · Score: 0

    Is it just me, or is it impossible to find a dvd drive that reads faster than 16x? How is it that these things can burn at 22-24, but I'm lucky to read at 16?

  25. No, not all PCs have S-Video output. by tepples · · Score: 1

    Or you can use a PC that already supports s-video, like every pc I've owned in the past decade, including laptops.

    But the PC at the location may not be one that you've owned in the past decade. Case in point: I went in an Office Depot a couple months ago, and zero desktop PCs for sale came with S-Video output. And if you know the owner of the TV has a DVD player (more likely than an HTPC), it's still a lot less work to lug around a burned DVD in a keep case than an entire desktop PC. Even on laptops, S-Video isn't universal; neither my ASUS Eee PC 900 nor my cousin's Acer Aspire one has it.