The fate of the 72X CD-ROM drive

[Tiberian Fiend]

Whatever happened to the 72X CD-ROM drive? I speak of the CD-ROM reader realeased by Kenwood in '00 that split the laser into seven beams, allowing it to read seven tracks at a time and giving it an effective speed of 72X. They suddenly disappeared from the market, and I can't find one anywhere today, even on eBay.

[DimensionDude]

Whatever happened to the 72X CD-ROM drive? I speak of the CD-ROM reader realeased by Kenwood in '00 that split the laser into seven beams, allowing it to read seven tracks at a time and giving it an effective speed of 72X. They suddenly disappeared from the market, and I can't find one anywhere today, even on eBay.


They seemed to have a very short lifespan. I purchased a brand-new Kenwood 62x drive in about 2000, it lasted 9 months and then died. Kenwood replaced it with a new 72x drive, it lasted 3 months.

Very quiet when running, none of that "Turbines to speed, Batman" nonsense that other fast cd-roms exhibit. Very fast on sequential reads such as game or OS installs. A bit faster than most for random reads.

I have a Kenwood True-X 52 but I don't know if it still works.

Kent

[TandyMan100]

I have a 48x (or sumtin') that works great. I can't really imagine 72X...


I belieeeeeevvvee I can Flyyyyyyyyyy.

[DreadStorm]

After trying a 52x and having the drive spin out, causing the CD to shatter into shards, I never go above a 40x CD reader. Too antsy about high speed disc readers since then.

[kb2syd]

Didn't the mythbusters cover this? I thought an undamaged CD didn't disintegrate until somewhere around 20,000 RPM (about 2x the 52x speed).

[TandyMan100]

Yes, they did. I saw that episode. Used some high-speed rotary tool (grinder, i think).

[Vlad]

I suppose if the drive vibrated hard enough the disc could wobble and nick an internal part causing it to break up. Maybe, I never actually opened one up before to look at the inside. The drive I have now I think tops out at 42x but I've had a 52x before that was a bit much and commonly failed at high speeds. I've seen 54x but wouldn't trust anything higher than 48x.

[kb2syd]

an undamaged CD

I did some more reading on this. I think the key is undamaged. A small crack at the hub can cause instabiliby leading to failure.

[DreadStorm]

Bingo, kb. I noticed early on it had tiny ridges and cracks in the hub. Wanna know what CD it was? It was my store-bought Windows XP retail upgrade disc. Luckily, I made an ISO image of it about a week prior.

Either way, I'm still very nervous about high-speed drives like that. Even if you know the statistics, seeing a pie-shaped wedge of a CD stuck half-way in the wall will still put a person on edge. heh

[Unknown_K]

I have a 50x and it gets a bit noisy sometimes. I think one of the reasons we never seen CD burners faster then 48x was because of vibration messing up writing (that and the faster speed was just at the edges so overall they were not much faster then slower drives).

[Tiberian Fiend]

72x is only an effective speed. I read that it actually spins at a much lower constant speed, and thusly, 72x is an average read speed, rather than maximum.

[Mad-Mike]

I never have felt the need to go above 48X much less 52x. I had a 48X in my 486, it copied files as fast as the hard disk would write em', I have some faster DVD drives in my 3.40 GHz Pentium D, same deal. Since the advent of ISO's, disk images, zip files, and large hard disks (and the chicanery to put them in older devices), I don't really use external media for much more than backups now anyway.

[michal]

I was always put off by the lack of speed of moders cd drives. For the common use, which wasn't playing the newest games from a brand-new boxed CD, but retrieving some old stuff from old CD-R's, a 52x drive was so much slower than an 8x one...

First, it needs to spin up. You hear the motor running faster and faster. You wait. The drives shakes and vibrates and makes engine-like noises. Then it begins to read. Tries, tries, tries, no deal. Spins down to 48x. Tries again. No deal, again. Here goes 32x. No luck. More wait. Tries at every single step down to 8x, 4x or even 1x, which is like 8 steps, take 30 secs for every step and you have 4 minutes just to read a 1MB file or so.

Repeat for every access. Try to stay calm... Exchange for an old 8x drive with the next occasion (most people will happily agree, with a thank You :)

[Unknown_K]

Liteon cdrom drives tend to not vibrate at high speeds so they read data fine. Some cheap cdrom drives do have problems with CDs that have lables on them that are slightly off center, or that are scratched or dirty.