Packet writing and BURN-Proof

There is also another fascinating technology able to help the RW packet writing market to grow…As mentioned in the introductory material of this article, packet writing shrinks the free space of a RW disk down to just over 500MB. This happens due to packet writing standard v2.0 limitations. Most of you will certainly remember our recent overview of the BURN-Proof technology. It not only prevents buffer underrun but can also help RW recording. The following figure from Sanyo graphically depicts all this:

How, you might ask: If BURN-Proof is adopted for packet writing, the link area will be just two (2) sectors when the original packet-writing specification requires seven (7) seven sectors.

This means that over 600MB of free space is available for fixed-packet writing, when the previously available formatted size was about 530MB! If this lack of space has held some people from using packet writing (well, it was actually some various other incompatibility problems as well...), then this will no more be the case.

Of course there are some other problems preventing the industry from adapting the "BURN-Proof packet writing" method. The main problem is that the new method isn't backward compatible with the UDF specification. Each new, enhanced, UDF reader will have to support the new format as well. We expect (and hope) that this will be solved in the near future.

- When should we expect to see the new higher-speed CD-RW drives?

As you might already know Yamaha will be the first company to ship a CD-RW drive with an 8x RW writing speed during May. Plextor and Ricoh announced 10xRW recording drives which probably will ship in June. Other manufactures (LG, Acer) plan to ship increased RW writing speed drives in June (12/8/32), but this might take longer since there is currently a shortage of shipping chipsets from the original manufactures.

Last we know for sure that several 10xRW drives are out for beta testing, so don't dare to think that the new high RW speed drives are too far away ;)

- What about High Speed RW recording media?

Ricoh recently announced new High Speed RW recording media which is compatible with the newest 10xRW recording CDR-W drives and has the special logo "High Speed RW" printed on a surface of the disk:

You can also see below the new Logo for high speed RW recording:

New High Speed RW Recording Logo	Old RW Recording Logo