Will There Ever Be Faster DVD and CD Drives?

Have you ever wondered why there are no faster CD and DVD drives?I just found an interesting article on HowToGeek website.

Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s we all enjoyed increasingly faster CD and DVD drives, but then the growth curve leveled off. Will we ever see faster optical disc drives?

The Question

Curious SuperUser reader User1301428 wanted to know why disc drives haven’t been getting any faster. He writes:

I was thinking about the fact that in the last years I have never seen CDs and DVDs supporting writing/reading speeds higher than 52X and 16X, respectively.

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)?

Well, which is it? Are such drives impractical to market or impractical to build?

The Answers

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.

The simple fact is Blu-ray is the future, of the optical discs and most of the manufactures know that. You can already burn a double layer DVD in a few minutes.

via HowToGeek