Today’s Question & Answer session comes to us courtesy of SuperUser—a subdivision of Stack Exchange, a community-driven grouping of Q&A web sites.
The Question
Curious SuperUser reader User1301428 wanted to know why disc drives haven’t been getting any faster. He writes:
Well, which is it? Are such drives impractical to market or impractical to build?
Is this a commercial choice (i.e. manufacturers don’t care about optical discs anymore and focus more on flash memories and SSD drives) or a technical limitation (i.e. optical drives cannot support higher writing and reading speeds)?
The Answers
SuperUser contributor PhonicUK offers up the following explanation:
It’s mostly a technical limitation. Put simply, if you spin the disk too fast it starts to become unstable and wobble around or even start to come apart under the sheer stress. At best this means read/write errors – and at worse means the possibility of it coming loose and causing damage.
At 52x speed, the disk is spinning at around 24000 RPM – at around 27000 RPM the disk would start to crack.
Dan Neely reminds us there were attempts to break through the speed barrier:
Finally, Ramhound points out that it’s of course possible, but that it will never happen thanks to the advent of Blu-ray:
It’s also worth noting that it isn’t just a question of structural integrity of the disk at high RPMs, but also of noise.
Looks like we’ll all just have to be happy burning our DL-DVDs in only a few minutes.
Have something to add to the explanation? Sound off in the the comments. Want to read more answers from other tech-savvy Stack Exchange users? Check out the full discussion thread here.
