Toshiba Samsung HD DVD drive for laptops
By Liam McNulty 
posted October 3rd 2005 5:30AM
posted October 3rd 2005 5:30AM
There was plenty of talk about HD DVD last week, and it appears at least something tangible came out of it: Toshiba Samsung Storage will start shipping samples of the world's first slimline HD DVD drive to vendors before the end of the year. The drive supports writing to all flavors of CD and DVD, but HD DVD support remains playback-only, at a whopping 1X. At least it's a start.
It makes you wonder what the investment is worth if you can't really write to hd-dvd's, let along try and read them at a speed of 1x.
Those software developers better have some big machines and hot burners in order to sell any software on hd-dvd's in bulk. Kind of reminds me of the time when computers were as big as rooms, and the printing press was the size of a mere kitchen table.
So how fast/slow is 1x? isn't the first standard speed always 1x? I'm too lazy to dig up some real info :) but couldn't that something like the fastest dvd drives right now?
1x doesn't mean it's slow.
Ponder this phrase from Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CD-ROM_drive):
"The 1x speed rating for CDs (150 kilobytes/s) is not to be confused with the 1x speed rating for DVDs (1.32 megabytes/s)."
Thus, HD-DVD 1x should be pretty fast.
Or simply put, HD-DVD 1x = speed for reading HD-DVD movies.
I dont know about 1x speed for Hd-Dvd, but I know that blue ray's 1x speed is 36mb/s...which is not bad at all as this'll increase with time. So lets try not to confuse this with 1x as far as regular dvds are concerned.
As far as takeup of this goes I'd imagine it'll be very market-dependent. All I'm thinking is it's going to shift more where set top HD-DVD players sell more, and as HD-TVs have only really taken off in the US (and maybe Japan - no idea there!) then computer and laptop drives will only sell in those markets and not for example in Europe where HD equipment is sold as something of the future
man thouse guyz post earl, i wanna try the new format!
The "x" speed for optical media is relative to the amount that media can hold. Thus, 1x read for HD DVD will be faster since the discs can hold more than CD or DVD, but not as fast as Blu-Ray because they have an even greater capacity. But that doesn't necessarily make getting this model worth it, either; obviously in the future you will be able to read/write HD DVD faster for a lower cost. Since the manufacturing process for HD DVD isn't that much different than DVD, this could take a shorter time than it did for DVDs or will for Blu-Ray, making it worthwhile waiting for faster HD DVD drives.
#8, why would the read speed be directly related to the amount of data the disc can hold? That's like saying there's a finite and equal amount of time it takes to read any disc media (CD, DVD, HD-DVD, etc) and therefore the bigger the capacity the faster it has to read data. Variations in the speeds that the formats spin the discs at would also effect it's read speed. For example, if blu ray spun its disc at half the speed of hd-dvd it would have a lower read speed even though it had higher capacity.
#9, I never said it was DIRECTLY related. The two are, by generalization, relative though. Of course, the speed the disc is spun at also has an effect; but when two equal-sized optical media are spun at the same speed, the higher-capacity disc has a faster data read rate because more data is able to covered in the same time (unless the bottleneck is with the drive interface eg. PATA or SATA). However, when you start to get factor in features like multiple layers and such, things get a little more difficult to determine, but in average the theory is the same.
General question - Plug this HD DVD drive into my (outdated) 2.8 Pentium IV Toshiba laptop with no DVI, HDMI and no HDCP chip, would I still be able to watch HD DVDs through the composite to a monitor or projector, with no derez to 480i?
1x speed for blue ray is 36Mbit/s and for the HD DVD is 36.55MBit/s.
Blue ray movie standard is 54Mbit/s so blue ray drive must be 2x (72Mbit/s) or faster in order to play the movie.
HD DVD movie standard is 36.55Mbit/s that is 1x HD DVD speed.