From Techwire, more on Hitachi DVD Drives
Super-fast ROM Drives Appear In Japan (03/03/97; 10 a.m. EST) By John Boyd , TechWire
TOKYO -- Even before users can fully understand the benefits of ROM drives built using next-generation DVD storage, Hitachi has dramatically boosted the speed of the technology.
The company, based here, will begin shipping sample volumes of the industry's first 2x digital video disk (DVD)-ROM drives on March 21, providing a data transfer rate of 2.75 megabytes and an average seek time of 150 milliseconds. That represents a significant increase in the power of the drives, which are only just starting to make their way into PCs.
"This means the drive will halve the time it takes to load up DVD software or a movie into a PC's memory," said Masahiro Takahashi, a Hitachi official. "It also means that when you select a certain DVD file or movie segment, it will halve the time it takes to load it into memory, because the transfer rate is equal to an 18x CD-ROM drive."
DVD is a much-touted next-generation storage technology aiming to replace CD-ROMs. One side of a DVD disk can hold between 4.7 and 8 gigabytes of data on a single or double layer, compared with 650 MB maximum on a CD-ROM disk. That's more than enough capacity to play back the longest Hollywood movie in a number of languages, and with better sound and picture quality than today's Laser Disc movies.
Matsushita Electric, Toshiba and other Japanese electronics manufacturers launched the first DVD players in Japan last year, which have since gone on sale in the United States. More recently Fujitsu,
Toshiba and Matsushita rolled out PCs incorporating DVD-ROM drives in the Japanese market, and most major U.S. PC vendors are also preparing to unveil their own DVD PC offerings later this year.
Like CD-ROM drives, where higher-speed models seem to be launched every few months or less, the Hitachi sampling of a double-speed DVD-ROM so early in the game suggests the same pattern of ever-increasing speeds will play out in DVD technology.
The Hitachi GD-2000 is an internal DVD unit for PCs featuring a double-laser pick-up system. A 650 nanometer (nm) red-light laser is used to read DVD disks, while a 780-nm infrared laser is used to read CD-ROM disks and also CD-Recordable disks. The latter double function is a useful feature, expected to appeal to corporations that produce their own in-house CD-ROMs.
The infrared laser provides for high-speed playback of CD-ROM disks with a rating of 20x -- or 20 times faster than the first-generation CD-ROM drive. This makes the GD-2000 the industry's fastest CD-ROM player, as well as the industry's fastest DVD-ROM drive.
Hitachi's Takahashi said the new drive was compatible with Microsoft's Windows 95 and 3.1 operating systems, but he had no information about a planned model compatible with Apple's Macintosh. The sample price is about $750. |
