Maximum PC optical drive RSS Feed

Cranberry Offers up DVDs that will Last 1,000 Years

Justin Kerr — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 16:44:48 -0600

Most people don't really think about it, but optical media, particularly the stuff you burn at home has a limited shelf life. Worse yet, depending on the quality of the disk, its probably a lot less than you might think. This is but one of many reasons why DVDs typically make lousy long term backups, that is of course, unless you have a burner from a new startup company called Cranberry. Its new optical technology called "DiamonDisk" claims to have a useable life of more than 1,000 years, or to put it in layman's terms, about 900 more than any of us would care about.

The durability of the disk is apparently a result of the media itself containing no dye layers, or adhesives / reflective materials that will deteriorate. Data is also said to be etched far more deeply into the disk using its proprietary burner. Currently a drive will set you back about five grand, but just in case you find this a bit extreme, you can also upload your data to the company's website and let them burn it for you.

Anyone considering this for a time capsule might also want to toss in a drive for good measure. 1,000 years from now a DVD is likely to be about as useable as an 8-track. Lets just hope they still use USB!

Pioneer BDR-2203

Katherine Stevenson — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 16:30:00 -0500

8x Blu-ray burner redeems itself

In our July issue, we reviewed OWC’s Mercury Pro 8x Blu-ray External and found the drive’s performance puzzling. In short, the Mercury Pro’s BD-R write speeds belied its 8x rating, with the drive taking nearly an hour to fill a 25GB disc with data, compared with the 22-plus minutes it took LG’s 6x GBW-H20L. It got us wondering whether the issues were more the fault of OWC’s external enclosure or the Pioneer 8x Blu-ray drive at its heart.

This month we were able to answer that question as we tested Pioneer’s BDR-2203, the same drive used in the Mercury Pro. We immediately cut to the chase, testing the BDR-2203’s BD-R write performance. While the Mercury Pro was incompatible with the Nero DiscSpeed app we use for our optical drive tests—forcing us to use Nero 8’s Burn Express instead—the BDR-2203 had no such problems. Using DiscSpeed along with 4x Verbatim media, the drive wrote 22.5GB of data to a BD-R disc in 14:56 (min:sec)—a Lab record!—maintaining 8x speeds through much of the job. With rewriteable media, the drive’s performance wasn’t quite as impressive. The BDR-2203 held a steady 2x speed when filling a 25GB BD-RE disc, for a time of 45:35, much like the Mercury Pro—and 15 percent slower than the LG GBW-H20L’s BD-RE write time.

It doesn't look like much, but the BDR-2203 blows away the competition when writing to Blu-ray discs.

With standard DVD media, the BDR-2203’s performance was pretty much in line with the Mercury Pro’s—and that’s not a bad thing. While neither drive toppled the GBW-H20L in DVD+R speeds, all three were virtually tied: Pioneer’s internal drive wrote 4.38GB of data to a single-layer disc in 6:06 compared with the external drive’s time of 6:16 and the LG drive’s time of 5:43. On the other hand, both the Mercury Pro and the BDR-2203 surpassed the GBW-H20L in our DVD-ripping benchmark, with scores that were 50 percent faster than the LG drive’s.

In the end, not only did Pioneer’s BDR-2203 prove that it wasn’t to blame for the Mercury Pro’s BD-R issues, it succeeded in unseating LG’s GBW-H20L as our Blu-ray burner of choice. After all, who wouldn’t want BD-R write times that are 30 percent faster for a comparable price, along with solid performance in all other areas?

Royal Digital Media Announces 100GB/Disc Blu-ray Killer, Supports 1920p

Alex Castle — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 14:40:37 -0500

Image Credit: Sony

It was at the beginning of 2008 that the Blu-ray/HD DVD format war came to an end, and it looks like the beginning of 2009 is going to see the start of a new battle. Blu-ray just got a new competitor, and if maker Royal Digital Media can deliver on their promises, it could mean big trouble for Sony’s format.

News of the new format broke by way of a press release from DreamStream, who RDM has contracted to provide military-grade, 2,048-bit encryption for the discs. Compared to Blue-rays paltry 128-bit encryption, the new format should prove significantly more of a challenge to crack, which must look good to publishers looking to protect their IP.

RDM says that their as-of-yet-unnamed HD disk will be able to hold 100GB of data, and will support 1920p video. That means that a single disc will be able to hold about 4 hours of super-HD content.

The best part about RDM’s new format? According to the press release, it’s based on “inexpensive red laser technology” and therefore the discs and players will cost about as much as traditional DVDs and players.

The format is scheduled to launch as soon as the beginning of 2009. It’s going to be interesting to see if they can keep their promises. If they can, is this going to spell the end of Blue-ray? Tell us what you think after the jump.

New Flying Lens Could Revolutionize Optical Drives, Render Blu-ray Obsolete

Andy Salisbury — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 15:24:09 -0500

Moore’s Law (which states that the maximum number of transistors on a given chip area doubles every one and a half years) has been a driving force in the hardware industry, and that doesn’t look like it’s going to change. Some of the industry’s biggest names are dumping money, time and effort with the goal of extending this, with the goal of pumping out some über hardware.

There are concerns already ahead, with companies like IBM, AMD and Intel all looking to move ahead to 32nm, problems with controlling light at ultra low nanometer resolutions are looming ahead. But, thanks to research from the University of California Berkeley that wall could crumble, and usher in a new generation of ultra-tiny transistors, and even a brand new type of drive that could end up replacing Blu-ray.

UC Berkeley’s Xiang Zhang and David Bogy, both professors of mechanical engineering took a new approach that uses a metal arm similar to that of a record turntable or a hard drive, and utilizes a tiny lens that quite literally flies over the chip wafer. This would allow designs that are being made at 80nm wide to become much smaller. And even still, with the wafer being spun at 12 meters per second, production would be fast. "Utilizing this plasmonic nanolithography, we will be able to make current microprocessors more than 10 times smaller, but far more powerful. This technology could also lead to ultra-high density disks that can hold 10 to 100 times more data than disks today," said Professor Zhang.

What’s more, the new tech has the potential of being cheaper than what we’ve got now. 45nm technologies are expensive thanks to complex lens and mirror setups required to concentrate the light that’s required to read data. This new method, called photolithography, would only have one costly component, which would be a plasmonic lens. The rest of the components would be run of the mill, and drop costs dramatically.

It’s expected that you’ll be seeing this breakthrough in your very own drives relatively soon. Professor Zhang states, "I expect in three to five years we could see industrial implementation of this technology. This could be used in microelectronics manufacturing or for optical data storage and provide resolution that is 10 to 20 times higher than current Blu-ray technology."

Image Credit: Liang Pan and Cheng Sun, UC Berkeley

Asus BC 1205PT

Katherine Stevenson — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 22:57:05 -0600

So your DVD burner is getting a little long in the tooth and you’re ready for an upgrade, but you’re not all that keen on adopting next-gen tech. And who can blame you? Even the falling price of hardware doesn’t make up for the relatively slow burn times, costly media, and compatibility issues that plague Blu-ray burners (and the same would be true of HD DVD burners if you could even find them!). Trouble is, you’ve got a brand-new 27-inch LCD that’s just begging to display high-def movies. What’s a consumer to do? Well, you could buy a combo drive—one that lets you read next-gen discs and write data to fast, friendly CD and DVD, like the two models we review this month.

With Asus’s BC-1205PT you get to read high-def discs, but only if they’re of the Blu-ray variety, so you’ll want to have a strong affinity for that format (and its affiliated movie studios) to take the plunge. Because while you do save money by forgoing the ability to write to Blu-ray, the BC-1205PT still isn’t cheap. It’s a couple hundred dollars more than a high-performance standard DVD drive, and its DVD burn performance is far from top-notch.

The BC-1205PT is rated at 12x for DVD+/-R write speeds—a good deal slower than today’s top DVD burners, now at 20x, and not surprisingly, burn times take a hit. It took us 7:12 (min:sec) to fill a single-layer DVD+R with the BC-1205PT, compared to the 5 minutes flat it took our favorite drive, Samsung’s SH-S203B (reviewed October 2007). Burning to a double-layer DVD, the Asus drive maintained a 3.96x average speed and filled the disc in 27:09, more than twice the time it took our Samsung. Only when burning to DVD-RW media did the Asus and Samsung perform on par, writing 4.38GB to a single-layer disc at 15:07 and 14:31, respectively. When reading data from all of our test discs, Asus’s drive had notably slower seek times than both the Samsung and the LG GCC-H20L reviewed here.

Middling performance aside, the BC-1205PT offers a SATA interface, the CyberLink BD Solution suite for playback and burning chores, and a simple, black face plate.

Testing Optical Drives

Katherine Stevenson — Thu, 26 Apr 2007 19:46:03 -0500

At Maximum PC we try to eliminate as many variables as possible when comparing hardware. That’s why we conduct our tests in the controlled environment of a lab, using built-to-spec test beds. That’s also why whenever possible we use the same application to test an entire category parts.

For optical drive tests, that application is Nero CD-DVD Speed. It comes as part of the Nero ToolKit Utility Suite, but it can also be downloaded for free at www.cdspeed2000.com. It’s updated on a regular basis to keep apace with new hardware and it supports all types of CD, DVD, Blu-ray, and HD DVD media.

In the course of evaluating a drive, I’ll first use Nero CD-DVD Speed to create a data disc. As the utility goes about filling the disc, a graph displays the drive’s progress—what percentage of the disc has been filled, at what speed the data is being written, and even the write speed in relation to the disc’s rotation speed. Once the write is complete, I conduct a read test, and following that Nero generates a report that provides everything from average read/write speeds, to seek times, to spin times, to CPU usage. In other words, a very thorough picture of a drive’s abilities.

I’ve found that often the software that comes bundled with a drive yields slightly better performance than Nero’s app does—a Blu-ray drive might, for instance, write to BD-R at +/- 46 minutes using CD-DVD Speed and +/- 44 using Cyberlink’s software. But my verdicts are based on the relative performance of the hardware itself, and I can only determine that by using the same application across the board. Plus, those other apps don’t offer the same granular detail.

Try the utility for yourself. It’ll give you a whole new appreciation for your optical drive—or convince you that it's time to upgrade.