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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."
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.