General > General Technical Chat
Hard Disk Storage 1985
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tooki:
Well, and not long after the 2x burners became common, buffer RAM did become common, and grew in capacity (all the way up to 16MB in the Yamaha 4416, IIRC). Not long after that, somebody figured out how to make CD burners that could interrupt recording and pick up again where they left off (leaving just a few bad bits that the drive ignored as dust on reading). Between that and superior computers and OSes that could handle the data streams better, the need for the large buffers diminished, and CD burners reverted to 2MB buffers. DVD-R drives mostly use 8MB I think.
james_s:
Given a write speed of 300kBps for a 2x drive it surprises me that a buffer of 2MB was not more than sufficient. I know computers were a lot slower back then but even so, I don't fully understand why it was such a challenge to keep a burner fed with steady data.
bd139:
Mainly due to the shitty IO subsystem that infested windows 9x variants.
rsjsouza:
And before that, Windows 3.x releases and their "cooperative" multitasking were absolutely appalling. Poorly written drivers and applications completely hijacked the system at times - it was not uncommon for the Corel CD Creator SW to freeze when it was starved of ACKs from the drive.  :-BROKE
tooki:
And in all fairness, the Macs of the era were only trivially better. In classic Mac OS you couldn’t dare try and burn in the background, at least not on burners without huge buffers. (Mac OS X could do it quite well.)

I think a lot of the problem with burning in the early days was that you weren’t just streaming a finished disc image to the burner. You were burning discs of files, and those files could be anywhere on the disk, and could be fragmented. (Windows back then was AWFUL about fragmentation.) So you could have a horribly fragmented file that had to be burned, but turned out to be in so many pieces that seeking to them reduced throughout to below the speed the burner needed.
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