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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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.