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16x DVD-R Drives Planned for 2004 168

Posted by CowboyNeal from the burn-baby-burn dept.
madsenj37 writes "From this article at PC World: 'Mitsubishi Electric has developed a more powerful semiconductor laser that should pave the way for 16X DVD writers to be commercially available by about 2004. The new laser is able to deliver pulses of light at a power of 200 milliwatts, which is double that of lasers used in today's 4X DVD writer drives, the Tokyo company said this week.' It goes on to say that a whole Digital Versatile Disc Could be written in about 3.5 minutes."
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16x DVD-R Drives Planned for 2004 More

16x DVD-R Drives Planned for 2004

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  • PowerMac schedule ? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by selderrr ( 523988 ) on Saturday December 28, 2002 @09:38AM (#4971965) Journal
    I sincerely hope Apple picks up where it left off with the superdrive : they were the first to incorporate it, but they're still stuck at 2x speed...

    I'm planning to buy a high end dual G4, but I'm waiting for Apple to up the specs on components (but NOT the CPU for a change) FSB, RAM, GPU... If I pay $5000 on a computer, I want the biggest, baddest machine available, and 8x or at least 4x DVD writing, 533MHZ FSB with Radeon 9700Pro should be default. Except for the BTO radeon, I'm have no other options but wait...
    • I have to assume that you said 533mhz fsb because you read that's what intel's fsb is. If that is the case, you, sir are a moron.

      I hope you do realize that the 533mhz FSB that intel is claiming is really a 133mhz bus that is quad-pumped (similar to agp which is 66mhz, double- quad- or 8way-pumped to give higher bandwidth but worse latency). This is not the optimal solution, and is certainly a far cry from a true 533mhz fsb.

      also- if you want the biggest, baddest machine available for $5000, you might want to look into dual athlons (or dual xeons if they will fit into the budget). Either one of these (at top available clock speed) will mop the floor with your dual G4 (yes, even in photoshop and in video editing), and will likely cost less to boot. Apples are for people who like their computer to look pretty as opposed to being more useful.

      ELiTeUI Out.

      • Re:PowerMac schedule ? (Score:4, Insightful)

        by sporty ( 27564 ) on Saturday December 28, 2002 @09:56AM (#4972012) Homepage
        I hope you do realize that the 533mhz FSB that intel is claiming is really a 133mhz bus that is quad-pumped (similar to agp which is 66mhz, double- quad- or 8way-pumped to give higher bandwidth but worse latency). This is not the optimal solution, and is certainly a far cry from a true 533mhz fsb.


        Is that so? Paralellism and efficiency depends on the application in use. If the bus, with one line, can always be ready to carry the next instruction without blocking the prior one, then sure, it's a great solution.

        If there is any reason for hesitation of the bus, then instructions will queue. It is just like SMP processors. It's not always guarnateed that any processor will be given it's full capacity to process. Is why SMP works out a little better as it handles extra instructions.

        Optimal solution, no, but a "true 533 bus" might have latency problems if the queue gets full.
        • http://arstechnica.com/paedia/b/bandwidth-latency/ bandwidth-latency-1.html

          true, it depends on the app, BUT most apps don't really take advantage of bandwith of memory transfers (it would only help if you are reading a large (ie larger than your cachesize) continouus section of ram. How many apps do that ?

          btw filling the queue on a "true 533 bus" would be a lot harder than it is now
          • true, it depends on the app, BUT most apps don't really take advantage of bandwith of memory transfers (it would only help if you are reading a large (ie larger than your cachesize) continouus section of ram. How many apps do that ?
            Well, in the case of video, I'd imagine image maps.. you know.. the textures on 3d objects. Having a lot of textures, I'd imagine, would require some time to do, not great, but some time. I don't know much about video cards in terms of how they handle textures, but to preload all your textures onto your videocard someday, or even some of it could happen.

            With a paralell bus, swapping textures in and out might be faster. :) Who needs the speed? I dunno, I'm just arguin' here.
      • I was going to continue the conversation, then I saw:
        Apples are for people who like their computer to look pretty as opposed to being more useful.
        Oh, so you're just a troll.

        Nevermind.

      • Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)

        by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Saturday December 28, 2002 @01:50PM (#4972746)
        Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • You misunderstand what quad or double pumped means. What happens is that data is transfered multiple times per clock cycle. With DDR ram, data is transfered both on the rising and falling edge of the signal. Hence, 200mhz DDR ram literally transfers data is fast as 400mhz SDR ram. There isn't any magic about it, it's literally twice as fast.

        Same with Intel's 4x bus. It really does transfer data as fast as a 533mhz bus that only transfers once per clock. There really isn't any disadvantage to it. It's just a mor advanced way of translating data.

        It is real similar to modems. At first, modems just transmitted data by using 2 tones, one for on one for off. They continued to scale the rate of transmission faster and faster. But eventually (at 300 baud) they were reaching the limit. So modems started using better signaling (multiple tones) to continue to increase the effective data transmission rate without increasing the rate of tones.

    • Re:PowerMac schedule ? (Score:4, Informative)

      by jerrytcow ( 66962 ) on Saturday December 28, 2002 @09:59AM (#4972022) Homepage
      I sincerely hope Apple picks up where it left off with the superdrive : they were the first to incorporate it, but they're still stuck at 2x speed...

      Actually they did update the superdrive [apple.com]. It writes DVD-R at 4x and DVD-RW at 2x.

      • Re:PowerMac schedule ? (Score:5, Informative)

        by elohim ( 512193 ) on Saturday December 28, 2002 @10:27AM (#4972088)
        still writes at just 2x, but now the drive is "compatible with 4x dvdr media"

        "Will this update enable my 2x SuperDrive to write at a higher speed?
        This update enables you to read from and write to the new media, but it does not increase the speed of the drive. In fact, the updated 2x SuperDrive writes to this new media at 1x. So to obtain the highest performance from your 2x SuperDrive, we recommend that you continue using 2x DVD-R media just as you do today."
    • Remember back in the day (c. 1997-98) when PC's were shipping with 10x-24x CD-ROM Drives and Macs were still shipping with 4x drives? Now apply Murphy's law to your current situation. Yep.
      • hmmmm... applying murphy's law... all dvd burners will spontaneously combust, releasing poisonous gases that will instantaneously choke the world's entire population... what does that have to do with macs?
      • Remember back in the day (c. 1997-98) when PC's were shipping with 10x-24x CD-ROM Drives and Macs were still shipping with 4x drives?
        No, I don't. My 1998 desktop G3 [lowendmac.com] included a 24x CD-ROM. That was the lowest model available at the time.

        "Apply Murphy's law" to your mental processes. Yep.

  • Free karma for whoever answers! (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Why the discrepency between CD-R and DVD-R drive speeds (i.e. 40x CD-R writes a 640mb disc in ~3.5 min whereas a 16x DVD-R would write a 4.7gb disc in ~3.5 minutes). Anyone?

    fp?

    • Re:Free karma for whoever answers! (Score:4, Informative)

      by selderrr ( 523988 ) on Saturday December 28, 2002 @09:43AM (#4971980) Journal
      one word : density. A DVD stores more information per square milimeter and thus has to rotate slower to pass the same amount of data under the laser.

      kewl, no ?

    • Re:Free karma for whoever answers! (Score:5, Informative)

      by Anti_Climax ( 447121 ) on Saturday December 28, 2002 @10:51AM (#4972158)
      It has to do with the specs for CDs and DVDs. The original audio CD standard required that about 150 KB be read from the disk each second. As drives became faster, they described their throughput as multiples of this base measure. With a DVD, which is primarily used for movies, the minimum throughput is much higher as video/audio information requires much more bandwidth than just audio. So the multiplier for DVDs represent a much larger chunk of data than that of a CD.

    • Re:Free karma for whoever answers! (Score:5, Informative)

      by Valdrax ( 32670 ) on Saturday December 28, 2002 @11:34AM (#4972276)
      The transfer rate for a 1X CD-ROM is 150 Kbps. The transfer rate for a 1X DVD-ROM is 1108 Kbps, with the media only having to spin 3X faster due to higher data densities. You can find out more here [dvddemystified.com].

      A 16X DVD-ROM would spin at the same speed as a 48X CD-ROM and would transfer 21.13 MBps (megabytes per second). This would take about 3.7 minutes to fill a 4.7 GB disk.
      • A 16X DVD-ROM would spin at the same speed as a 48X CD-ROM and would transfer 21.13 MBps (megabytes per second). This would take about 3.7 minutes to fill a 4.7 GB disk.

        In reality, I am guessing that the RPM limitations would take hold on the inner tracks. Like with 48x CD writers, where lead-in, lead-out and RPM limits prevent a faster write, I think it would be more realistic to expect six or seven minute burns. That is still pretty fast though.

  • Someone should anticipate the future... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Faggot ( 614416 ) <choads@gay.LIONcom minus cat> on Saturday December 28, 2002 @09:39AM (#4971968) Homepage
    ...and develop a DVD substrate that won't ignite as lasers move to higher power and lower wavelength.

    I hereby patent that idea.

  • But for the raid (Score:5, Funny)

    by jockm ( 233372 ) on Saturday December 28, 2002 @09:40AM (#4971974) Homepage
    it will count as 4 4x burners...

    • Re:But for the raid (Score:3, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward

      RIAA/MPAA translation:

      Equivalent of 16 DVD burners...

      Then, press translation out of RIAA/MPAA translation:

      16 DVD burners

    • Re:But for the raid (Score:4, Funny)

      by gblues ( 90260 ) on Saturday December 28, 2002 @12:39PM (#4972478)
      No, no, no.

      The "x" rating of DVD burners is an entirely different beast from the "x" rating for CD-R burners. In other words, a 1x DVD writer is not the same as a 1x CD writer.

      I'm not sure what the equivalency rating is. I think a 1x DVD is equivalent to a 4x CD, so this would be the equivalent of 64 CD burners for the raid, not 4. ;)

      Unless you're talking about an MPAA raid instead of an RIAA raid. Then you'd be correct.

      Nathan
    • it will count as 4 4x burners...
      But, obviously, those lowly pirates [wikipedia.org] are obviously using it to copy movies in divx format (or whatever is in avi today..), it's equivalent to about eight time more DVD burners.. Don't ask about CD though, those are even more outrageous, they are using these to copy about ten times more (MP3 compression), to seven times larger media, with about twenty times the speed of a CD... That's equivalent to thousands of CD writers! The horror...

  • 16 speed? (Score:4, Funny)

    by Dark Lord Seth ( 584963 ) on Saturday December 28, 2002 @09:41AM (#4971976) Journal

    Well, if DVD burning is anything like CD burning, then we can also expect the first DVD coasters in 2004...

  • too fast? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by mobets ( 101759 ) on Saturday December 28, 2002 @09:41AM (#4971977) Journal
    At that speed drives will be capable of writing data at 176 megabits per second

    Maybe things will change in a year, but my hardrive only reads at about 60 Mbps. That isn't even half the speed this drive is suposed to be able to write at. The only way I can see this working is if you have the memory to buffer 3GB before you start writing.

    • Re:too fast? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Alex_Ionescu ( 199153 ) on Saturday December 28, 2002 @09:55AM (#4972008) Homepage
      I think you mean 60MB/s (MegaBYTES per second, roughly ATA-66) and nor 60Mbps (MegaBITS per second, rougly 8MB/s, which is something like first-generation IDE drives).
      178MBps would mean about 22MB/s, fast enough for any computer with as little as ATA-33 support.
      • oops It seems I was mistaken. although that leads me to ask another question. If my drives read and write so fast (as you pointed out, and I demonstrated for myself), why do I only get 60Mbps over my switched full duplex 100Mb network? This is actualy where I got got the 60 Mbps number. I kind of figured I was being limited by drive read / write speeds if I wasn't maxing out the network.
      • 178MBps would mean about 22MB/s

        no, 178MBps = 178MB/s
        Now... 178M b ps = 22.25 MB/s

        it's all in the capitalization =)
    • your hard drive reads at a LOT faster than 60mbit/sec (60Mbps = 7.5MBps = 7.5MByte/sec) unless your computer is about 6-7 years old. most new, modern IDE drives are currently maxing out at around 50-60 MByte/sec which is equal to 400-480 MBit/sec (incidentally, my cheetah 15k.3 drive does between 600-890Mbit/sec, which is between 75 and 111 MByte/sec).

      ELiTeUI Out.

      • your hard drive reads at a LOT faster than 60mbit/sec (60Mbps = 7.5MBps = 7.5MByte/sec) unless your computer is about 6-7 years old.

        My roommate's 18 month old laptop displays a progress meter when it comes out of hibernate that reads "n of 128 MB read". The n increased at a rough rate of 5 MB per second. Thus, that must be a normal rate for slow laptop hard drives, and when I saw "60 mbps", I assumed "laptop".

        incidentally, my cheetah 15k.3 drive

        Is available only for big bulky desktop computers because it draws so much power.

      • incidentally, my cheetah 15k.3 drive does between 600-890Mbit/sec, which is between 75 and 111 MByte/sec
        You should have read the spec sheet more carefully. That's the internal speeds.

        The spec sheet says 49-75 MB/s sustained transfers -- which is still really fast, but not as fast as you quoted.

        The spec sheet is here [seagate.com].

        Note that modern IDE drives come pretty close to this. I do consider myself a `SCSI bigot', but I must acknowledge that modern IDE drives do haul much ass. The problem is that they require massive amounts of your system's CPU to do so. SCSI is much nicer to your system -- but much harder to your pocketbook (seems like the price differential lately has been around 5:1 for SCSI vs IDE. Ugh!)

        • I must acknowledge that modern IDE drives do haul much ass. The problem is that they require massive amounts of your system's CPU to do so.

          That's very true if you use the supplied-by-the-cheapest-bidder controller that's built into most motherboards. But, if you drop a couple of hundred bucks on a decent controller - perhaps even a 64-bit, 66Mhz PCI board - the situation will improve dramatically.

          If you're going to compare IDE vs. SCSI, at least be fair about it - don't compare your $300 ultra fast wide SCSI 3 controller to a built-in IDE chipset that probably cost the m/b maker less than $10.
          • But, if you drop a couple of hundred bucks on a decent controller - perhaps even a 64-bit, 66Mhz PCI board - the situation will improve dramatically.
            Are you speaking from personal experience? If so, with which controller?

            And my Adaptec 29160 only cost me about $100 :)

            • Are you speaking from personal experience?

              Yes, but it's not recent. I upgraded a musician friend's PC about a year ago with a controller that cost about $100 or so - I think it was a Promise. It was a RAID controller, but even with only one drive, it was noticably faster.

              Several years ago, I had a caching controller with 16MB and its own 68000 CPU. I think I paid a bit over $100 for that, too.

              I've never run benchmarks, but the impression I get from informal use is that the onboard controllers on most m/bs are more or less literally a dime a dozen. Criticizing IDE based on their performance would be like criticizing SCSI based on the performance of the no-name ISA controller that came bundled with a scanner I once had.

  • Something I have always wondered . . . (Score:5, Interesting)

    by div_2n ( 525075 ) on Saturday December 28, 2002 @09:47AM (#4971992)
    Would it be possible to have multiple lasers all burning at once to increase speed? Like dual lasers working on opposite sides of the disk.

    Of course, the software logic required to keep the lasers out of each others layers could be complex, but it seems from an ignorant stance that you could immediately double write speed that way. Add three and would you triple?

    Anyone that knows more than me have a word on this?
    • My understanding of the burning pattern is that it occurs in an 'unbroken' (within certain specifications) spiral. I believe there is a 'laser guide' that follows a pre-etched spiral on the blank media and the laser burns in the spiral pattern that's already there.

      Two lasers would result in two complete spirals, thus requiring two seperate lasers to read the resulting data trails.

      -Matt
      • Thats why it was for a long time impossible to resume a CD after a buffer underun. However modern advancments in technology let drives precisely find the location where they left off (ie BURN-PROOF). The same might be possible for DVD. I assume its just a matter of accuracy weather or not you can get the two lasers to end up meeting at exactly the right bit...

    • Would it be possible to have multiple lasers all burning at once to increase speed? Like dual lasers working on opposite sides of the disk.

      Well I suppose it's possible, it kinda reminds me of the floppy drives on the orginal Apple Lisa, it had two sets of head on opposite ends of the disk. It was the only computer that used that kind of the arrange ment. From what I remember it was not a sucess, you never see any computers using any such drives now adays?
    • I know the Truespeed CD readers operated on the same basis, only they had 7 reading heads, not writing. I suppose you could do the same with writing heads, but I guess they would be a lot harder to align properly, with much less tolerances. Besides, I don't really think there's that big a marked, if you can't do it within a reasonable time with 16x burning you'll likely to for pressed DVDs anyway. That's why the truespeed drives failed really, if you needed that fast a CD, why not have it on hdd instead...

      Kjella

    • Zen TrueX (Score:2, Informative)

      by hendridm ( 302246 )
      > Would it be possible to have multiple lasers all burning at once to increase speed?

      You may remember Zen Research [zenresearch.com] who created the TrueX technology found in the old Kenwood 72x [smartcomputing.com] drives. I believe these used 7 heads for reading data. However, the technology seems to have died, along with the company. I remember reading reports of the drives not being 100% compatible, having speed issues, and having high failure rates.

      • they got whapped by a couple things (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 28, 2002 @12:36PM (#4972470)
        First was they were dependent on the spiral pitch being relatively constant so they could hit 7 tracks at once. Well, they were constant until 80 minute CDs came out.
        Second is that the tracks on CD-Rs aren't completely parallel. CD-R tracks have a slight wobble to them to allow the writer to determine the rotation rate of the disk (and thus how far they are along) while writing. The wobble is a fixed frequency, and thus as the track lengths change from inside to outside, the wobble does not nest up nicely between tracks like Pringles chips. So, all of a sudden, tracking one track didn't keep the other 6 readers on line.
        Finally, they got killed by copy protected CDs. Copy protected CDs purposely have bad sections to them. With most CD drives you read up until you get to the bad spot and then the drive freaks. On a Zen, the drive would freak 6 rotations early. This made it incompatible with copy protections and slowed the read speeds in the protected area.

        To be honest, the technology, while neat, had a fatal flaw from the start. On a single head drive, when the disk rotates around once the head is advanced to new data on the next spiral. On the Zen, the head is ONLY advanced one spiral. Thus, 6 of the heads are reading the same spiral that the head next to them read last time around and only one head is reading new data. Thus, you have to get off the spiral, move the head, and then servo lock to the spiral again. And once of the slowest things a CD-drive can do is servo lock to the spiral. This is why seek times are in the 50ms range (used to be 150ms!). So you get data at 7X speed, then have to pick up and move to another spot for 1/20th second, then get data at 7X again. It's no wonder the drives rarely produced the speeds they spoke of.
    • Would it be possible to have multiple lasers all burning at once to increase speed? Like dual lasers working on opposite sides of the disk.

      CD and DVD store the data as a continuous spiral on the disc, so while it is easy to have multiple read heads I think it would be very difficult to have multiple write heads.

  • RIAA (Score:2, Redundant)

    by stud9920 ( 236753 )
    Wow ! They must each count as five DVD writers, 'cause they're real fast !

  • Tron (Score:2, Funny)

    by YellowSnow ( 569705 )
    If Moores law applied to the strength of dvd lasers by 2009 users will be getting disintegrated like Jeff Bridges, especially if you were violating the EULA,

    Where do you want to go in a puff of smoke today

  • WOMD (Score:2, Funny)

    by Esion Modnar ( 632431 )
    Careful! Up that laser power too much and we'll be in material breach of the UN thingy on weapons of mass destruction...

  • Can't come soon enough! (Score:4, Informative)

    by MonTemplar ( 174120 ) on Saturday December 28, 2002 @10:14AM (#4972060) Homepage Journal
    I work for a software duplication & fulfilment firm, and we started doing in-house DVD-R duplication this year, alongside our existing CD-R duplicators. Waiting for the machine to burn the DVD-R discs, it feels like we've stepped back in time about 10 years, to when the first CD-R recorders came out (we still have our original Philips CDD-521 box in a cupboard somewhere, bought when writers cost several grand and discs cost 20 quid a pop!) Anything that makes for faster DVD writing would be a good thing indeed!

  • Bus Limits? (Score:4, Informative)

    by devnullkac ( 223246 ) on Saturday December 28, 2002 @10:29AM (#4972094) Homepage

    I don't have the specs on my 1-year-old machine, but a quick test turned up a transfer rate of about 140mpbs transfer off my IDE hard drive while the CD-ROM was busy reading a CD on the second IDE channel. That's well short of the 176mpbs claimed for the 16x burners, suggesting the market for these devices may be smaller than anticipated for the first few years, keeping their price higher.

    Hopefully SATA will be fast enough to compensate and widely available in time to make this product marketable.

    • Unless you have 64 bit or 66mhz pci, the pci bus is limited to 133 megabytes/sec. I don't know of any motherboard manufacturers plugging sata directly into the south bridge yet, althought there are a whole bunch doing it with firewire. Of course firewire right now is limited to 50 megabytes/sec so that's not really going to work either. PCIX here we come.
    • All the 8 fastest 7200rpm drives:
      Western Digital Caviar WD2000BB (200 GB ATA-100) - 33.1
      Western Digital Caviar WD2000JB (200 GB ATA-100) - 32.8
      Western Digital Caviar WD1200JB (120 GB ATA-100) - 29.2
      Western Digital Caviar WD1200BB (120 GB ATA-100) - 29.1
      Samsung SpinPoint P40 (80 GB ATA-100) - 26.0
      Maxtor DiamondMax Plus D740X (80 GB ATA-133) - 25.4
      IBM Deskstar 120GXP (120 GB ATA-100) - 25.0
      Seagate Barracuda ATA V (120 GB ATA-100) - 24.7

      ...have minimum transfer rates far higher than 16x1,108 = 17,7 megabyte/s. If they're on separate channels, you should be fine with a good old non-serial ATA disk...

      Kjella

  • It is much smaller too (Score:3, Funny)

    by Pofy ( 471469 ) on Saturday December 28, 2002 @10:32AM (#4972105)
    The article never managed to mentioned that it is only 1/4th in size. After all it is the equivalency of 4 normal DVD writers and yet the same size. Talk about size efficienzy!
  • ... The MPAA/RIAA &c. start a DMCA-based lawsuit against the DVD-R drive manufacturers.

    While they're at it, they might as well sue the makers of Sharpie markers for trafficking in merchandise that can be used to circumvent most CD copy protection.

    They should also sue my aunt, she manufactured a 6-year old son who can decode the ROT-13 encryption on e-books. ;)

  • Hmm... (Score:3, Funny)

    by El Puerco Loco ( 31491 ) on Saturday December 28, 2002 @10:47AM (#4972148)
    looks like i'm going to have to upgrade my Netflix subscription.

  • In other news... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Qzukk ( 229616 ) on Saturday December 28, 2002 @10:52AM (#4972168) Journal
    Yesterday MPAA agents raided Mitsubishi Labs and "confiscated" the equivalant of 1600 DVD burners at gunpoint.

    The MPAA issued a press release, claiming "We must do whatever it takes to stop these pirates. If that means sidestepping the tradiotional forms of law enforcement when they have failed us, then so be it."

    Likewise Mitsubishi issued a press release: "Yesterday our lab was broken into by two hoodlums in black clothing, who stole 100 of our prototype 16x dvd players."

  • 16x DVD-R? (Score:3, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 28, 2002 @11:10AM (#4972210)
    That's like a 160x CD burner. DVD transfer rate ~ 10x CD transfer rate. There's one problem...most CD and DVD driver are still on the 33 MB ATA interface. A 16x DVD burner pushes the limit on that. Most 16x DVD-ROM drives never transfer anywhere near 16x.
  • So all that money Reagan sunk into the Strategic Defense Initiative is finally going to pay off!

  • SCSI? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by xombo ( 628858 ) on Saturday December 28, 2002 @11:45AM (#4972315)
    Will these be in some form of SCSI since IDE would probalby not hold up for this unless you had a very large buffer. Apple uses SCSI for almost everything now, maybe it is time we see SCSI in PCs more often now.
    • Apple got a clue a while ago and decided to bring their prices just that much closer to PC prices by thinking similar (finally). They use IDE for pretty much everything now.

      Perhaps they'll start making iMacs with optional monitors next (wow!).
    • Apple uses SCSI for almost everything now
      Which bizarro universe do you live in? Apple used to use SCSI for almost everything (up until approximately the first Powermacs came out), but now most of their computers are either IDE or Firewire. They do still do some SCSI, but not much -- mostly in their high end machines.

      Examples:

      G4 Powerbook [apple.com] - IDE.
      Power Mac G4 [apple.com] - IDE, but they say you can add a SCSI card ...

      And those are their highest end non-server systems, which I found by going to http://www.apple.com and clicking on the pretty pictures ...

  • When DVDs were first coming out, all the talk was about the fact that you could write two layers on each side, thus getting rediculous amounts of data on them. Are there double-sided DVD-R discs? Are there burners that can do double layers?
    • DVD disks support two sides and two layers, so defacto quadropling the capacity of a single layered, single sided disk.

      DVD-R unfortunatly only supports one layer. Although I have seen double sided DVD-R disks, but those require flipping them upside down to access the other half of the data.

      Most DVD-Video disks use two layers on one side to increase the capacity above 4.3GB. This means that to copy most DVD-Video disks, it is neccessary to reencode the video at a lower bitrate, or remove some extras.

      I would also be looking forward to a release of a dual layer DVD-R disk, but I assume itll be very difficult to acheive with current technology (at least unless its to cost thousands).
      • The pioneer rep I talk to recently basically said that double-sided DVD-Rs were used mainly in automated DVD jukeboxes. Because of handling issues (fingerprints, scratches, dust), most people with home burners don't use them - by the time you finished burning the first side, chances are you'd have ruined part of the second side. Either that, or after you finished the dual sided burn, at some point in the future, you'd ruin the side facing the top. In a jukebox, it doesn't matter since it's a controlled environment.
  • It's going to be like floppy backups again, changing the disk every few minutes. We need a changer for this to work as a backup medium.

    It's getting annoying that the DAT drive costs more than the rest of the computer.

    • Pioneer sells a jukebox system for $13,000+, DVD-R drives not included. I was looking at the system as a replacement for tape drives, and the sales rep I talked to basically told me to hold off until the Blue-laser drives [newscientist.com] get released in the states. Supposedly they'll deliver twice the current capacity for both CD-Rs and DVD-Rs, assuming that they ever get adopted here...
  • commercially available by about 2004.

    That'll be good timing, it'll take that long before consumers figure out which standard will be the safe one to buy.

  • ... but im not that optimistic until I actually see it.

    Its all too often companys announce they are working on something revolutionary, and the only outcome is raised stocks for them, and no final product.

    Four years ago we had IBM claiming cheaply available 6 Terrabyte solid state hard disks the size of a sugar cube will be availible in 2000...
    • IBM claiming cheaply available 6 Terrabyte solid state hard disks the size of a sugar cube will be availible in 2000.
      LOL...wow. I think the only thing you got right there was the part about "size of a sugar cube."

      I don't recall the specifics, but it wasn't IBM...in fact, no company was mentioned...it was just "a group of researchers." I believe the capacity was closer to 2GB, not 6TB. It was some sort of weird cellular (as in real cells, not cell phones) technology, not "solid state." The technology was for RAM, not hard disks. And, finally, there was never an availability date mentioned.

  • It'll all end in tears... (Score:4, Funny)

    by FFFish ( 7567 ) on Saturday December 28, 2002 @01:00PM (#4972546) Homepage
    ...when someone releases a standalone portable burner using this technology. One'll just head down to the video store and burn DVDs as one pretends to browse for a rental. A half-hour later, you've got fifteen pirate movies...
    • Would be kewl, but two major obstacles...

      1) DVD-R disks have 4.3GB max capacity. Most DVD video disks use two layers. You would have to reencode the video at a lower bitrate (takes hours on a fast modern CPU). Alternatly you could split it into two DVD-R disks.

      Wouldnt it be better to have a portable 200+ GB HDD drive. On average 30 DVDs can be stored there before you go home and convert them to DIVX.

      2) Dunno about you, but all the rental stores ive seen only have the boxes availible for display. After youve chosen what movies you want, you have to go over to the counter, pay, and get the disk put into the boxes. Quite a big obstacle....

      Oh, and.. umm.. its illegal even if it could be possible, and id never think of doing it... urm.. well.. maybe *evil grin*

  • Maybe this will settle the format.... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by DeadBugs ( 546475 ) on Saturday December 28, 2002 @01:09PM (#4972591) Homepage
    Maybe a 16X DVD-R drive will settle the war between DVD-R and DVD+R. One can only hope.

  • Which flavor was that, again? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by dpbsmith ( 263124 ) on Saturday December 28, 2002 @05:35PM (#4973374) Homepage
    We don't need a faster DVD recorder. What we need is someone to make sense out of all of the umpteen gazillion different DVD recordable formats--DVD-RAM, DVD+R, DVD-RW, DVD÷WR, DVD+-R, DVD\W, DVD*ROM, etc. etc. and make it clear WHICH of the silly things can actually be played reliably on the current installed base of DVD players.

    Incidentally, how the heck is anything but a specialty store going to be able to STOCK all of those six or eight kinds of recordable media--in any kind of reasonable choice of manufacture, or packaging? (Do YOU know off the top of your head which of the formats are available as 2-side? As 2-layered? As 2-sided, 2-layered?)

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