I worked at a Philips research site. During the days of the 2x and 4x writers they only produced 4x capable writers. The limits in speed/read/write were set by the firmware. (And ofcourse the frontpanel was a little different. )
After a while the story leaked. On the web you could download 3th party flash tools that bypassed the build-in protection against 'overspeeding' your writer.
I don't know if they are still doing this with their new writers.
They reason why they did it? Low production costs. When a writer went out to mass-production (mostly in a cheap labour country) they only had to change the frontpanel and the firmware chip.
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I worked at a Philips research site. During the days of the 2x and 4x writers they only produced 4x capable writers. The limits in speed/read/write were set by the firmware. (And ofcourse the frontpanel was a little different. )
After a while the story leaked. On the web you could download 3th party flash tools that bypassed the build-in protection against 'overspeeding' your writer.
I don't know if they are still doing this with their new writers.
They reason why they did it? Low production costs. When a writer went out to mass-production (mostly in a cheap labour country) they only had to change the frontpanel and the firmware chip.