Lasse Penttinen
14 May 2002 14:08
The people of BusinessWeek have realised something that smart burners have known for ages. The significance of speed improvements has decreased as writing speeds have increased. We already discussed about this earlier when the news of a 60x chipset by Sharp was announced.
Once upon a time, a big jump in CD-R write speed ratings for CD-Rewritable drives meant that new drives could reduce the time needed to write a disc by as much as one-third. We tested two shipping models of the new 40X generation--CenDyne's Lightning III 40x12x48 and Plextor's PlexWriter 40/12/40A--and found that they cut only about 16 seconds off the average time that a 32X drive needs to burn a 650MB disc.
And as always with the latest ultra-fast writers, there are the media issues, possible burn quality issues and the fact that can you take full advantage of the speed with on-the-fly copying?
BusinessWeek