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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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.