Everyone needs a CD-ROM capable of ludicrous speed

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fretinator007@reddit

I remember I had a 30 or 40x CD-ROM. Every time it spun up I thought a plane was talking off.

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52x CD-ROM was the max speed because at full rotational velocity, it was approaching the actual mechanical shear limits of the plastic. They'd be doing 9000-10000 RPM; some discs would go 'boom' at 12000.

I remember reading an asterisk on the back of a 'Mad Dog' 52x burner once. It was a Sony drive inside the box, but on the outer packaging it said:

Max burn speed: 52x*

and down at the bottom it said (I can still see it plain as day): "Burning discs using 52x 'Turbo Mode' may cause catastrophic failure of the device."

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WildMartin429@reddit

I had a 52x CD ROM drive and then a DVD RW Drive I think the DVD play speed was only 12x though. But you needed that 52x for games that required the CD to be to drive and actually used it.

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2748seiceps@reddit

I blew up Starcraft in my 56x drive back in the day. I usually had it in the 24x4x4 burner drive because the 56x was loud but had lent that out to a friend and it had a tiny crack at the center I didn't even think twice about.

Disc was small pieces and the drive member read a disc again. Stuck a Creative 48x in the hoping it was just low enough to not blow up which worked.

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namedjughead@reddit

Enjoy the jet engine noises. If you decide that it's too loud, CDBeQuiet can reduce it down to a reasonable speed and decibel level.

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Michaeldim1@reddit

I’m pretty sure this is that drive that achieves the higher speed by using multiple lasers simultaneously, and that way it’s able to get huge data rates without actually spinning the disk that fast. The Kenwood 72X.

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namedjughead@reddit

That's pretty cool. The majority of high speed drives are loud AF.

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ducksauz@reddit

Did you retro-bright the case between those shots, or is it just a difference in lighting?

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theSiliconSiren@reddit (OP)

Nope, just lighting, but that was mostly the same too. The new CD-ROM isn’t yellow at all, so I think that’s what you’re mostly noticing 😁

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deskiller1this@reddit

I used to have a amd 500mhz compaq presario that was fast with cdrom. I now have a 500mhz Intel p3 with a gigabyte bx2000 board and any drive I use in it is slow.

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NevynPA@reddit

I always wanted a TrueX drive, but never managed to get one.

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n1ghtbringer@reddit

They were great while they lasted but were notoriously unreliable. I had two back in the day but I think they both died inside of a year.

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8bitKittyKat@reddit

In the late 90s I witnessed a friend eject a still spinning disc from one of those high speed drives and the disc flew across the room.

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TNT3215@reddit

Build in frisbee thrower

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theSiliconSiren@reddit (OP)

More like a guillotine 🤣

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Jolly-Put-9634@reddit

Interesting case style

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No-Solid9108@reddit

I have a retro gaming PC that runs Windows XP. Somebody gave me a more modern DVD drive that uses SATA .

SO I FIGURED why not plug the new DVD drive into one of my shader ports ?

WORKS PERFECTLY but I really don't know if it's really fast or not .

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accent2012@reddit

The highest speed I remember that was available was a 72x speed CDRW it could not burn at that speed but read discs and I heard it was very loud and problematic. 56x was more reliable but not always read at that speed because of the inherent wobble of the disc in the drives.

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nucflashevent@reddit

Most of those stories, about unreliability i mean, was the initial version. Kenwood issued a firmware update and they were every bit as reliable as any other drive after that.

Sound was never an issue, I've always thought people just assumed it "must be loud" based only on the fact it was 72x, not realizing that by using multiple lasers, the drives spun slower than drives half it's speed.

I only wish the same tech had been applied to DVD and later Blu-ray drives