Underclocking cd-rw?

[afterburn]

Anybody know a way to make a 8x min burn speed drive burn at lower speeds? I know of a tool that will alter READ speed and spindown but what about WRITE speed?

[SVCDummy]

Even if you find a way to make it stable enough to work...
DONT DO IT!

The reason a drive is rated at a high min speed is that the laser is already running at greater than 90% of it's max rating. The faster speed means the length of time the laser is turned on is shorter at high speed and therefore does no generate as much heat. If you slow it down the heat build up will burn it out in a very short time. For longer life and slower burn ability the laser needs to be running at less than 80% of it's max rating (that is a heat rating btw). Good drives cost more for the higher quality laser parts and drive motors which generate less heat and last longer.

It's not worth it unless you just happen to have a bunch of these drives laying around to throw away.

[afterburn]

er ... you apear to have missed what i said:

UNDERclocking
make the speed LOWER

[SVCDummy]

No, I didn't miss!

When you slow down the burn the laser has to turn itself on for longer intervals therby raising the heat generated.

Faster burns means shorter laser intervals and less heat.

Cheaper lasers are running to close to their max heat rating already and therby must have a FASTER MINIMUM burn rate in order to further reduce the heat in the drive.

If you slow down a cheap laser it will fry!

If your not technically competent enough to understand this then that is OK but don't tell a drive engineer that he missed the point!

[ZippyP.]

but don't tell a drive engineer that he missed the point!

So let's see if I got the point. Cheap drives need to spin faster so that their lasers don't burn out. Right?

[SVCDummy]

Close...

Cheap LASER

Sometimes even the beter brand drives are using the cheaper laser in their lower end models.

When drive speeds made the big jump from 4x and 8x to 24x,32x, and 52x it was mostly due to the timing and accuracy of the trigger circuits to turn on the laser at the right time for the burn.

Once the timing was perfected the laser itself became the next target for cost savings. With high speed writting (burning) becoming popular it was easy to skimp on the heat tolerances of the laser by limiting the amout of "on" time the laser is used. the only way to do this was to limit the minimum write speed to a higher number.

Older CD writers will almost always write at 1x or 2x. It has only been recently that some drives cannot tolerate slower speeds and it is related to the heat tolerances of the laser.

So its cheap LASER not neccessarily cheap DRIVE. It is more important to read the specs of the drive to determine the quality of the laser.