Enough With the Disc Formats

I think that many of us would agree that optical drives have clearly hit a wall for the time being. While a few drives can push the 16x write speed to 18x on premium media, this only speeds up the write process by a handful of seconds anyway. The real excitement is in next generation media, but the format war between HD DVD vs. Blu-Ray, and the drive prices north of $500 have put the kabosh on most users plans to buy on of these drives until prices drop next year (or maybe even 2008).

What's an optical drive company to do? How about come out with a useless interim media! How about DVD-RW double layer rewritable? Check this out from our friends over at CDR Info:

The DVD Forum approved the DVD specifications for Re-recordable Disc for Dual Layer (DVD-RW for DL) (Part 1 PHYSICAL SPECIFICATIONS Version 2.0) in September 2006. The new disc offers a capacity of 8.54GB per side for a 12cm disc and a 2.66GB per side for an 8cm disc. According to the DVD Forum. the new Ver.2.0 discs should only be used with hardware which conforms to Ver.2.0, and not with hardware which conforms to the previous versions of DVD Re-recordable media, currently available on the market (Ver.1.0, Ver.1.1 or Ver.1.2).

So now, not only do we have a new media standard that no one really wanted, to fill a niche that really never existed, but even better, the existing drives can't even use these discs! This sounds like a boondoggle of the first order to me, that creates a disc and drive that is totally unnecessary for just about every user. Don't get me wrong, but in my experience, dual layer DVD's, and rewritable discs simply are not reliable enough on their own, that I would even consider combining these two technologies onto one silver piece of plastic.

Don't mind me while I sit this one out.

--Jonas

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DVD, optical disc, optical drive, rewritable technology, storage