Re: New CD-R high capacity drive specs are coming. (fwd)

["Michael H. Warfield" <mhw@wittsend.com>]

On Thu, Dec 07, 2000 at 12:33:35PM -0500, M Sweger wrote:

> Hi,

>    See the article below.

> I just read that the specs are out for three different types of CD-R
> drives in terms of disk capacity and speeds from Constellation 3D,and it
> is heading towards manufacturing. It's great for movies and coporate
> archiving, but was degraded for the consumer market -- Nothing above
> 5Gb/side for the consumer whereas for the coporate it's 200Gb/side. I
> don't think it will  compete for the PC market unless the disk capacities
> are upped! Probably purposely degraded so that you can't copy a HDTV DVD
> to your PC CD-R disk. Here is the 
> <a href="http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/001207/ny_constel.html">link </a>

	Look at those specs closely and you may understand a little
better.  The "consumer" device is for the small 45mm discs (about the
size of the credit card CD's or the little MO music discs).

	The CD sized (120mm) discs are the 32 Gig per side "VCR" devices.
They've always said (first announcement well over a year ago) that
they would focus first on the small disc r/w format for the consumer.
My bet would be that the CD sized drives and the 32 Gig FMD discs
would not be far behind.

	The 200Gig devices are a whopping 300mm!  That's 2-1/2 the
diameter of the current CD format.  That's a 12" platter we are talking
about here.  That will be NICE for large centers with large data demands
(kiss them tapes GOOD BY) but I don't see it on MY desk top!  :-)

	So it's strictly a physical packaging and production issue.  I can
certainly see where they would want to roll that little 1.8" format out
the door for the consumer market first.  Lots of us would love to have
the larger 5-1/2" format and I'm sure it won't be far behind, but
you have to choose your initial devices carefully to avoid over
burdening your startup production.

	I certainly wouldn't call it "degraded for the consumer market"
any more than I would call those little MO discs "degraded for the
consumer market".  Those little discs are likely to be perfect for the
consumer market (Radio Shack "pop a disc from your pocket into a player"
crowd).  That form factor would also be fantastic for PDAs, handhelds,
and small laptops.

	I don't see any real conspiracy here, just some sensible business
and production planning (gee, how refreshing).

	Mike
-- 
 Michael H. Warfield    |  (770) 985-6132   |  mhw@WittsEnd.com
  (The Mad Wizard)      |  (678) 463-0932   |  http://www.wittsend.com/mhw/
  NIC whois:  MHW9      |  An optimist believes we live in the best of all
 PGP Key: 0xDF1DD471    |  possible worlds.  A pessimist is sure of it!

-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/