AWKWARD ZOMBIE

I think everyone in this thread needs to stop being so confident that he or she is always right.

I mean, at least that's what I think...

Huh. I was under the assumption the instrument used also mattered. Since HDDs are air-tight interference-free, and can interact with the disc more precisely, it was faster. Sure, the data density mattered, but I didn't think that much.

Yetabytes.

BUT IM ALWAYS RIGHT

I HEARD THAT IT NEEDS 1.2 GIGAWATTS FOR POWER

DONT DISPUTE ME ON THIS I KNOW WHAT IM TALKING ABOUT

At the risk of getting involved... Very bad comparison to make, for a couple of reasons.

1) Your average DVD drive firmware is coded to always assume that a freshly inserted disc is a CD, and then if it finds out otherwise, treat it like a DVD. That means the drive always has to execute the CD step before the DVD step, and it's not doing anything useful during the CD step if you've got a DVD in there.

2) VCD and DVD are two entirely different standards. VCD defines a 1152kbps MPEG-1 stream with 224kbps MP2 audio. DVD bitrates are more loosely defined, but in general are MPEG-2 video streams between 2mbps and 8mbps with an AC3 audio stream. Then you have to take stuff like CSS encryption into consideration, on top of the heavier MPEG-2 standard, which are going to bog down whatever's doing the decoding (CPU, GPU, MPEG riser card, whatever). By the time you get down to a discussion of load times, there's way more going on than just track width.

Now if you'd wanted to compare sustained I/O speeds, yes, you'd be right, due to data density. That's assuming your CD and DVD drives are making the same number of revolutions per minute - the more common nx designation is pretty misleading, because 1x on a CD is 150KB/s whereas 1x on a DVD is more like 1.3MB/s - it's some long decimal and I can't remember it.

Yeah I'm gonna stop there.



HDDs aren't air-tight, and there's nothing more "precise" about a magnetic pickup versus an optical pickup.

GREAT SCOTT