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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."
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
GENERATION 25: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
... 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?"
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.
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.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
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.
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.
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.
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.
Ouch, still higher than HDDs.
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 ...
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.
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.
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).
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.
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!
If you need physical media, flash drives are by far superior anyway. I ONLY use dvds for boot devices nowadays.
Why not just power down?
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
How about just tilting a mirror?
I just pooped your party.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Also, these things cannot suspend the laws of physics.
Where's Scotty when we need?
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.
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.
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.
Him. Where's Scotty when we need HIM.
*sigh*
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
Scattered over Puget Sound.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
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.
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.
It's not clear that it's even technically possible. Maybe if the mechanism was in a vacuum.
Ludicrous speed! Go!
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!
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.
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.
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.
Holy shit, I just swallowed my chewing tobacco!
The Illuminati would kill me, but I'm not rich enough to take notice of.
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.
Touch everywhere, even when inappropriate.
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.
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.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
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
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.
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?
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.
You're not supposed to archive data on optical disks anyway.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The faster yuo burn the more "sloppy" the burning is on the disk.
The same could be said of typing...
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.
Bow-ties are cool.
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.
Methinks, you may have wanted to examine the quality of the cds you are using instead of the speed of the cd rom...
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...
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.
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 ...