A feeling of déjà vu (General Comments on CD/DVD Recorders)

Name: isvikthere

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Product:	General Comments on CD/DVD Recorders
Date:	27.11.02 (970 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: progress can't be stopped

Disadvantages: get your wallet out once again

While the latest offering from Lite-On in CD rewriters promises us speeds of 52x24x52 (write-rewrite-read), CDrewriters in my view are rapidly approaching the end of their useful life. This because, although still the perfect setup for copying audio and dataCD's, the physical limitations of a CD to 700Mb or 80 minutes are no longer enough for making backups of all our data or storing the movies we acquired.

I noticed that in the shops medium level personal computers are now being offered with harddisks up to 120gigabytes in size, which would mean that you would roughly need about 170 blank CDs of 700 Megabytes capacity to make a full backup of your harddrive. A daunting and almost impossbile task. Of course you can make your life easier by only backing up the real vital data but that would still mean you need to make a few dozen copies. And make no mistake, backups have to be made as harddisks don't last forever and if ever a fatal crash occurs your precious music files, movies, projects or whatever you stored on it will be lost forever. If you're lucky the harddrive will be replaced under warranty but what you will get is an empty disk in return of your crashed old one. Data recovery services do exist for crashed harddrives but they are unaffordable for most of us mortals. A bad omen here is that for the US market the harddrive manufacturers have recently agreed on reducing their basic warranty period from three to only one year. For me this is a clear indication that even they are not that confident anymore about their products which, with increased capacity, spindle speed and low access times have become more vulnerable to lethal breakdowns.

Note : Motherboards with raid controllers onboard are becoming more and more familiar, but don't forget if the raid option is used with two harddrives where one is the mirror of the other - so you always have a backup of all your data on hand - both harddrives in use will have the same a

ge and if ever they are the same model they can suffer from the same weaknesses and/or breakdowns.

For this reason and also because everyone is now very eager to make copies of videoDVD's I think that CDrewriters are out and DVDrewriters are the new kids in town. A blank single-sided DVD-R disk currently has 4,7 Gigabytes of storage capacity or eight times the capacity of a blank 700MB CD.

Of course the DVD recorders are still struggling a bit with unique standards Unfortunately this also means that they will have us hooked again on their strategy of steadily upping the write and rewrite speeds of these devices just like they did with the CDwriters at first and the CDrewriters a bit later on. Same strategy of course for the price setting where DVDrewriters are currently offered for more or less the same price asked for the first generations of CDwriters not that long ago (1997). Further proof that they are getting us hooked again is found in the fact that second generation DVDrewriters with a speed of 4x (four times the initial DVDwriting speed of 1,4 megabytes per second) and 2x rewriting speed are now already on offer. By means of comparison speed 1x for the first CDwriters was a mere 150 Kilobytes per second, almost ten times slower than DVD 1x)

My advice : if you are the current owner of a decent speed CDrewriter, let's say one that can write at a guaranteed speed of about 12x , which allows you to make CD copies in about 10 minutes, don't bother too much investing in the latest and speedier CDrewriter offering, but wait just a few months more to watch prices for DVDrewriters come down even further and their (re)writing speed increase, and buy that instead. As hopefully all manufacturers will to come together to one unique standard I'm sure speeds will go up very quickly and prices will come down even quicker, just like happened for the CD(re)writers over the last couple of years. Also some DVD(re)writers are mult
istan
dard so they can write or rewrite on almoste everything between CD-R, CD-RW, DVD+/- R and DVD+/-RW or even DVDram.

------------------------------
UPDATE December 2003
------------------------------

1. 52x24x52 still seem to have become the maximum speeds for CDrewriters, of which prices have come down this year even more than I expected. They cost as much or less than a CDreader a while back. Some manufacturers do offer modesl that exceed these speeds e.g. 54x24x54 or 52x32x52.

2. There are now both media and CDrewriters that allow writing up to 99mins of music onto one CD. I seriously wonder if all CDplayers can read them though.

3. The "war" between DVDR(W) plus + and minus - is still not over although some sources seem to consider the + techology to be the superior one of the two. However if the DVDR(W) + therefore will become THE standard is still not sure. In the meantime to tackle this many drive manufacturers seem more and more to resort to the multistandard DVDrewriters I described above. Over the last year DVD(re)writing speeds haven gone up, with 8X now the maximum speed for DVDwriting. I don't know if after this there is still room for improvement. But DVDwriting at 8x gives you a full DVD or 4,7 gigabytes of data in 8 minutes ! This is really astonishingas the fastest CDwriters do it in 3 minutes at best for only 1/7 of the data.

But prices have come down considerably especially for the monostandard (+ OR -) DVDRewriters which you can now find in the shops for around 65 pounds. The multistandard writers at 4x writing speed are becoming very affordable too. I've already seen one on offer (be it from a lesser known brand) for some 80 pounds. The ones that manage writing at 8x still carry a hefty pricetag, but after initially it was only Plextor that offered them, now the other (lesser ?) brands also jump on the 8x bandwagon, just as I predicted in the first version of this
contribution.

As for all computer hardware those that can wait will either get more for their money or pay less than the initial price.


Cheers,
Vik

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