Cd Burn Speeds

[TheSpeedoBeast]

Well, this was a tossup between the hardware and /dev/random fourms, but we will give this one a go anyway. Sorry for any wrong forum placement problems. I just got a stack of 50 nice (free! kudos to office max!) cd-rw's and they work great, but are unfortunately rated at 4x max speed. Now I gotta figure out a way to get my burn times under 20 minutes. :rolleyes:

So, my question here is actually 3-part:

1. What is the term that one would use for saying "making your computer burn a cd at a faster speed than what it is rated at"?

2. How much can you "overclock your burning speed" (the term that I am going to use for right now) without getting error messages // messing up the cd on say, a 4x cd-rw?

3. Will your burning program let you know that you had errors while performing a burn, or will the program just let the burn complete without letting you know that the cd was burnt incorrectly? (i.e. xcdroast)

[DSwain]

1. uhhh... overwrite or something like that.
2. It depends really, usually the media has some set limits. Many CD-R's can say something like "12x" and write at 48x perfectly fine, and others at 32x can't hit 40x. Its confusing, and i'm not sure about CD-RW's, but i would just try stuff and see what happens because you can just start over.
3. things like k3b and i assume xcdroast will give you an error message. You shouldn't have to worry about that.

[TheSpeedoBeast]

Hm, so basically experiment and see what happens? Well, that is how I have learned what I have from linux thus far, so I dont really have a reason to change anything. Thanks for your input though.

[DSwain]

for the most part, i believe that's the only way to truly learn. Of course, going to classes, written guides, and so on all will help the learning process, but the true way to learn whats going on is to study things yourself and see what happens, and ask questions too. btw, no problem, and good luck.

[psi42]

You may have to pass driveropts=forcespeed to cdrecord to force the drive to burn above the rated speed of the disc.

[TheSpeedoBeast]

Ok psi, thanks for that cdrecord option; probably just saved me another new post asking another lame question : -)

[EnigmaOne]

Exceeding rated (or certified) burn speed is a great way to make coasters to protect your furniture from those nasty, white, condensation rings.
While Miss Manners might approve of your plans, you'll end up a bit frustrated at the attempt--for the most part.

Overburning refers to placing 700 (or more) MB of data on a CD-R blank that is otherwise certified for 650MB.

On those freebies that OfficeDepot dumps on the market--yeah, I get 'em too--I go with one-half the rated burn speed and never end up with a Frisbee. **


**('Frisbee' is a trademark of Whamm-O, Inc., and has no affiliation with HomeDepot, Inc. in promoting the incidence of failed CD burn sessions; nor do they endorse my colloquial use of their product name....Bad Me!)

[bandwidth_pig]

Overburning is to burn more data to a disk than what it "supposedly holds". For example, if you have a 750 meg CD-R, with overburning you can fit 800 meg. Has nothing to do with speed at all. And, almost all burners on the market will burn CDRWs at a blisteringly SLOW speed...which is where your problem is coming from. Even if the medium itself was rated higher, the burner is still going to burn slow because of the RW format. Go get some CDRs not CDRWs and slap them and you'll see your burn times improve quite a bit.

[DSwain]

oh my mistake, i used the wrong term then. I think he was trying to go for burn faster than the stated speed, not compacity. Sorry about that.

[TheSpeedoBeast]

Yeah, I realize that I will coaster a lot, but that is the beauty of rewritable cd's --- they are rewritable!! And they are really nice for distros that are near-continually updating their versions and making you dump the old cd-r's of those cd's... Oh, and one more thing: where is it possible to pass that command to cdrecord when you are using xcdroast? I am having problems with that at the moment... thanks for you replies!

[hard candy]

From "man cdrecord":
forcespeed
Normally, modern drives know the highest
possible speed for different media and may
reduce the speed in order to grant best
write quality. Some drives (e.g. Ricoh and
Yamaha) allow to force the drive to use the
selected speed even if the medium is so bad
that the write quality would be poor. This
option tells such a drive to force to use
the selected speed regardless of the medium
quality.

Use this option with extreme care and note
that the drive should know better which
medium will work at full speed. The default
is to turn forcespeed off, regardless of the
defaults of the drive.

[TheSpeedoBeast]

I did know what it meant, I was asking where the option was located in xcdroast, but I did end up finding it. (create cd -> write tracks -> write tracks -> advanced options) but once I have that option passed... how do you get it to make it burn faster than what the media is rated at?? I have the option passed, my speed cranked up to 6x, and it is still only writing at 4x... any ideas?

[EnigmaOne]

Originally posted by TheSpeedoBeast
Yeah, I realize that I will coaster a lot, but that is the beauty of rewritable cd's --- they are rewritable!!
::: slamming my forehead against the desk ::: :o
I completely missed the 'w' portion of cd-rw!
Sorry, my bad.

I have the option passed, my speed cranked up to 6x, and it is still only writing at 4x... any ideas?
Ummmmm....this may sound dumb, but what is the rated 'RW' write speed of your drive?

Maybe it's another of my snap-judgements, but it sounds like your drive is rated at 4X for RW media???

[TheSpeedoBeast]

Nope, it is a 48x24x48 drive.

[mdwatts]

Personally I have never tried to burn a cdr/w at a speed that is greater than what the media is rated for. In fact I usually burn at a slightly slower speed just to be on the safe side.

As the other member have already stated, you will never know if it will work unless you try. Let us know if you are successful and the maximum write speed you were able to obtain for these 4x cdrw's.

BTW... Has anyone noticed that the 52x writers have been out for some time now and nothing faster has been released to the market for many months? Is the 52x write speed the maximum a cdwriter can support? Similiar to the 56k modems.

[rocketpcguy]

try using cdrecord (command line) instead.

also, it might not give errors and yet have mistakes in burning. you better make n compare MD5SUMS.

and what's that avatar, is it a panty?

[XiaoKJ]

Personally I have never tried to burn a cdr/w at a speed that is greater than what the media is rated for. In fact I usually burn at a slightly slower speed just to be on the safe side.

As the other member have already stated, you will never know if it will work unless you try. Let us know if you are successful and the maximum write speed you were able to obtain for these 4x cdrw's.

BTW... Has anyone noticed that the 52x writers have been out for some time now and nothing faster has been released to the market for many months? Is the 52x write speed the maximum a cdwriter can support? Similiar to the 56k modems.

For me, I have met a crazy problem -- burning speed too slow...:confused:

My cd-rw burner HAS to burn at top speed for it to work fine, or else the cd will come out faulty...
Then the system gets so hot I got fed up, opened the case and directly blow a desktop fan at top speed at it to burn well.

BTW, I think the cdrw's speed should be the limitation as the erasing factor needs to be taken into consideration. But trying on an cdrw is definitely ok as one can erase them later.

The 52x speed is the highest a cd drive can go, thus the cd too. yeah, it is like the 56k limit, till dvd came with the adsl breakthrough.

[mdwatts]

Originally posted by XiaoKJ

The 52x speed is the highest a cd drive can go, thus the cd too. yeah, it is like the 56k limit, till dvd came with the adsl breakthrough.

I had never heard or read anything on 52x being the maximum write speed, but was just wondering since it's been months since any of the manufacturers released faster writers. Now I know my 52x24x52 is likely about as fast as they'll go. Thanks for verifying. :)

[TheSpeedoBeast]

Yeah the cd write speed is just like the dvd max speed of 8x-ish (but still transfers data way faster). But I still cannot get my cd to burn at over 4x; I will keep looking into it, maybe see if I can do it with windows and nero or whatever. But oh well, not a huge problem.

And by the way, my avatar is not a pair of panties, it is a speedo :) hence the name "thespeedobeast" (and no I do not have a fetish with speedoes, I am on swim team, so my name almost makes sense)

[DSwain]

i'm not sure, but my assumption is since they already have 8x multiformat dvd writers out at cheap prices theres no more real reason to keep going upward and might want to push to migrate to DVD writing?

Not sure though, i'm happy with 40x though, 52x would really be out of the roof.

[TheSpeedoBeast]

No, I am sure that the max dvd writing speeds are just way lower (with respect to X's, not actual mbit/sec transfer speed) than cd's are; if there was an actual way to up the speed on those, trust me, someone would have that 144x burning dvd drive already developed and on the market by now...

[DSwain]

oh yeah i know they are much slower. Cd writers do 52x now and dvd writers at about 8x but a dvd writer can burn both cd's and dvd's pretty fast, and now fairly cheaply too. so i figure that they are just trying to push for a dvd writer standard since it wouldn't make sense to house both when one can do the same thing almost as well with additional features. That's why i don't believe they are making newer cd-writers and moving on to dvd writers