Writing to a disk

[Terry]

I have watched the burn time using Nero and Alcohol.
The burn time starts out low, like around 16X and it will slowly climb
to around 48K.

I can only assume it starts writing near the center of the disk and
writes outward. Is this correct?

If it is, do hard drives start writing near the center?

Would it not make faster writes if it used the edge first?

 

[You Know Who ~]

It does, indeed, start and the center and works outward. Still, that seems
like a slow start. Do you have the CD writer hooked up to the same IDE
channel as your hard drive that is feeding the burner? That could cause
some slowdown. Also, the amount of ram your system has makes a difference.

 

[Terry]

I was asking more of a general question rather than trying to get more
performance out of my burner.

I am pretty sure it if mattered they would be doing it, but I can
remember when hard drives had an interleave so the reads would not
miss data.

This is no longer true today. Right?

Wouldn't it make more sense to have the first data stored at the edge?

Thanks

 

[LVTravel]

SNIP

Wouldn't it make more sense to have the first data stored
at the edge?

SNIP

Not really. Drives these days don't have the same geometry
as the ones of the old days had. Before the drives
basically had the same number of sectors on the outside of
the disk platter as the inside. The data was just more
spread out in the outer tracks. The problem in the older
days was that the electronic components couldn't process the
data flow as fast as the read/write head could produce the
data to the electronics so you had to "wait" for the
electronics to send the information it had received from one
sector before reading the next sector. (In other words the
drive had to wait for the computer but now the computer has
to wait for the drive.) It was always fun setting the
interleave factor on different speed hard drives. Now the
electronics can transfer data without the interleave
problems of the past. Many drives have actually more
sectors per track on the outside of the platters than they
do on the inside of the platter so they store more data out
there per inch of real-estate but the speed of data transfer
remains fairly constant from the inside to the outside of
the platter..

Some good hard drive information can be read here:
http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/op/index.htm with information
on the Zone Bit recording here:
http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/geom/tracks_ZBR.htm