News Headlines
- Sat, May 18
- Assassin's Creed movie, starring Michael Fassbender, coming to theaters Memorial Day 2015
- Fri, May 17
- Dust: An Elysian Tail hitting PC May 24, the Blade of Ahrah and the power it controls awaits
- PC port of Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance confirmed, no release date given
- The Wonderful 101's not so wonderful release date announced, pushed to September 15
- Trion Worlds, developer for MMOs RIFT and Defiance, suffers heavy layoffs
New Articles
Related Articles
So just how fast is 40X burning? The spec rates it at 6,000Kb/sec, or under 2 minutes for a full, 650MB burn! On top of this, the CD-RW speeds are now at 12X which was the max burn speed of the high-end drives only half year ago. Now thats some serious progress.
Z-CLV Takes it Further
The Zone based burning technology (Z-CLV) introduced for 24X drives is still the key to the increasingly faster drives. The improvements with the newer drives enable the very last burning stage to hit 40X speeds but the basics of ZCLV remain intact. Each of the drives uses this type of method to reach high speed burns, which is why you wont actually see the theoretical 2 minute 640MB disc the burn process only reaches its full 6000Kb/s burn rate in the last quarter of the burn, when the drive head is at the outermost portion of the disc. ZCLV allows higher speed burns, but the actual performance of a 40X drive using ZCLV is not going to even be close to double the speed of a 24X drive. What you will see, though, is a measurable and appreciable improvement over 24X and 32X drives.
Fast, but safe and quiet
By the way, even with the increase in speed, you wont be making any extra coasters or anything Burn-Proof, JustLink, huge buffers (a la Samsung) and other such related methods are all good protection against buffer underun errors. And the most surprising thing of all these drives are quiet, very quiet. Even when burning at full 40X speed, the drives are even more quiet then older drives burning 12X or so a welcome relief considering the worry of the noise to speed ratio of mechanical devices.
Media Considerations
The faster you burn, the more your burns will be relying on the quality of the media used. Not all media is made equal, and currently there is little media which explicitly states it is good up to 40X. What most people are finding, is that discs rated at lower speeds are still good up to 40X. Most drives will be able to detect and adjust the maximum burn speed allowed on different media types, and most of the manufacturers also recommend certain brands for highest reliability and 40X compatibility. CD-RW discs also will have different reliabilities. In our tests for example, the Plextor drive refused to burn at 12X speed on high speed media rated up to 10X unless we tricked it into doing so. And even then, the burn times would be around the speed of a 10X drive.
All of the drives we tested had upgradeable firmware, and some of the firmware updates indicate improvements in either burning speeds or media recognition and compatibility.
In our tests, the lack of media rated explicitly for 40X CD-R burns and 12X CD-RW burns were a major concern, so we asked manufacturers to supply or recommend media types for testing. In the end, we used the unbranded, 12X media that came with the MSI drive for our CD-RW tests, and unbranded 32X (high speed) media for our 40X burn tests.
If you are unsure what media to use, dont worry. Most manufacturers will list actual recommendations. For instance, Samsung recommends using Ricoh, RCC, Ritek, CMC, PRODISC, PRINCO and BEALL discs for CD-R burns.
Article Index
|
|
media do they 'prefer', etc. In fact, CDRInfo needs a little competition. Others (yourselves) might replicate their findings or you might not and have a good explanation why. It's a burner-buyer's jungle out there and while cheapies seem to do a reasonable job of simple tasks, e.g. backing HD data, they suddenly turn to cheese when asked to perform intensive routines (backups of copy-protected CDs.) I'm wondering, too..what's the story with the move towards tiny 2MB buffers with buffer underrun (whichever type)? Plextor and others insist on 4MB - some manufacturers, 8MB (e.g. Teac (+ BurnProof) and until recently AOpen (plus JustLink).) I've read it's 'balanced technology.' Yet the 2MB drives are mainly cheap. Is the real reason market share, not true quality? A good example - the 3248 2MB Aopen. Useless (though their more expensive, now redundant 8MB was OK.)
I think the CDInfo vs. CD-Speed firmware discrepancy is a goof up. We made the CD-Info screenshot before we did testing. All testing was done on the latest firmware though. The Lite-On is damn fast.
The reason I mention this is if you are trying to do a Z-CLV comparrison, then using the ZS0K is not fair, as it is in P-CAV format and will write faster across the spread on a large burn.
But, this should not change your results as the Liteon is faster than all the other dirves for the most part anyway with all the other ZSxx firmwares. Not to mention that the Liteon will make backups of any protected CD out there. Whereas the Plextor can not do Safe Disk v2.51 without using software tricks (i.e. "amplify weak sectors" ala Clone CD or Blindwrite).