Ram Drives... $53 bucks

[fkloster]

What a deal. How else can optical drives improve? Are we going to see 24x drives?

 

[Bobthelost]

Probably not. Quality of burn and feature set will no doubt improve but it's going to be pretty incremental untill HD DVD and blueray kick in.

 

[cubby1223]

LG has had drives like that for a couple years now, on par cost-wise with the rest of the dvd burners. But I do not think we even have 16x dvd-r discs out, I don't see them going up to 24x any time soon. As for HD DVD & Blu-ray, I don't see those available soon either, I see them being delayed much further because they seem to want to make sure their content protection is 100% secure before they release it - which as we know is probably not possible.

 

[Bobthelost]

Originally posted by: cubby1223
LG has had drives like that for a couple years now, on par cost-wise with the rest of the dvd burners. But I do not think we even have 16x dvd-r discs out, I don't see them going up to 24x any time soon. As for HD DVD & Blu-ray, I don't see those available soon either, I see them being delayed much further because they seem to want to make sure their content protection is 100% secure before they release it - which as we know is probably not possible.

We do, lots and lots of em 😉

 

[hurtstotalktoyou]

You can get a brand new ND-3550A for $38-$43, depending on the day. I recently got a used burner for $26 shipped. If you need DVD-RAM support, well, as you can see it's no more than $53 (and probably less than that!). DVD burners are as we speak enjoying their heyday.

 

[LethalWolfe]

How much faster do you think Blu-ray and HD-DVD will be? Will the quality of blanks improve so much that we'll get past the physical limitations that have stalled the burning speeds of current optical media? I think optical drives are pretty much tapped out and we won't see anything revolutionary in storage again until something like holographic storage starts hitting the market.

Lethal

 

[fkloster]

...until something like holographic storage

<-- best possible drooling homer simpson face possible... Nice!

 

[foodfightr]

If you ask me, optical drives peaked years ago..... we're just fine tuning them. 🙂

....... now if we could only mass produce hard drives that weren't mechanical.......

:shocked:

 

[stardrek]

Originally posted by: LethalWolfe
How much faster do you think Blu-ray and HD-DVD will be? Will the quality of blanks improve so much that we'll get past the physical limitations that have stalled the burning speeds of current optical media? I think optical drives are pretty much tapped out and we won't see anything revolutionary in storage again until something like holographic storage starts hitting the market.

Lethal

It isn't that the speed of rotaion will increase, it is the amount of information within each rotation increases. With a much increased density the MB/s will go up a fair amount.

1x speed on a CD is 150Kbps
1x speed on a DVD is 11.08Mbps
1x on Blue-Ray is about 36Mbps

So a 8x Blue-Ray tops out faster then a 16x DVD drive.
8x Blue-Ray = 288Mbps = 36MB/s
16x DVD = 176.96MBps = 22.12MB/s

They suspect that Blue-Ray discs will be able to go to a max of 10,000 RPMs, so a 12x speed should be possible for the outer edges of the disc.