Optical Storage: CD and DVD Drives
There was a time
when floppy disks were the only way to move large amounts of data around. As programs got bigger and more complex, the
need for mass, portable storage became more apparent. It started to get ridiculous when programs were coming on 20
different floppy disks. When the CD-ROM
was brought to the market, everything changed.
You could then move around about 600 MB of data (or 300 floppy
disks-worth) on a single compact disc.
Talk about a world of difference!
The early CD-ROM
drives were spotty, really spotty. They
ran at 1x and 2x the normal speed of an audio CD player. The funny thing was, developers and
programmers hadn’t yet caught up with this massive jump in storage. Many CD-ROM based programs were just above
the limit of floppy disk usefulness. As
a result, many programs that came on CD only used about 10% of the disc’s
storage. The major difference about a
CD was that you could not write anything to it. They were ’as is’ and could never be changed.
Of course, with the
new capacity came new ideas and possibilities.
Soon, programs were coming on multiple CDs. People began to demand the ability to copy CDs and back-up data
to them. The first CD-R drives came out
in the late 90’s. They were horrible
when it came to reliability. But really
this just reflected inadequate system specifications as a whole. Now, the modern CD-R/RW can write a complete
CD in 2 minutes at 52x the original speed.
As I write this, the
industry is poised at the edge of another transition. With the development of the DVD, the DVD-ROM has begun
penetrating into the PC market. There
are some programs now coming out on 4-6 CDs that could easily fit onto one
DVD. Now that DVD-R technology is
slowly catching up with CD-R technology in price and performance, it’s only a
matter of time before all programs are distributed through DVDs.
The latest and
greatest development in optical drive technology is the combo drive. I recently picked up one of these by LG and
it’s been great. The idea is to combine
a DVD-ROM with a CD-R/RW drive. You can
get a 16x DVD-ROM + 52x24x52x (read, re-write, and write speeds) CD-ROM built
into the same physical drive. This helps
reduce the number of drives in your system but it’s usually a good idea to have
at least one writer drive and one reader drive if you ever want to copy
straight off another CD.
Proposed
advancements in the field of optical drives are the HD-DVD and the Blu-Ray
discs. Right now, the two standards are
competing with each other to be the next generation in DVD storage. HD-DVD is headed by Toshiba, while the
Blu-Ray disc is headed by Sony. As of
right now, it looks like the HD-DVD is winning more support.
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