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Optical Drive Speeds

Doing math and converting kB to Mb and so on gives me a headache, and I can't be particularly certain that I'm doing it right. Therefore, these are the speeds in binary bytes, as in, this is what I use in dvd_info and bluray_info when deciding how much memory to allocate or drive speed to run at, as in an char.

You can do the conversion on your own to another format, because I can't be certain of my own work, and also because numerous resources use the wrong naming syntax (kB vs Kb vs kb vs KB, and so on, going up or down from there).

DVDS

Drive Speed Bytes (B) Source
1x 1,385,000 OSTA

Blu-rays

Drive Speed Bytes (B) Source
1x 4,718,592 Blu-ray Specifications

While writing this, I can't find the exact source, but I do know it was a PDF of the official Blu-ray spec. You can see the public specs here - http://www.blu-raydisc.com/en/Industry/Specifications/PublicSpecs.aspx

Market Availability

My Blu-ray / DVD drive is old (from 2009), and it's an 4x BD-ROM, and 8x DVD-ROM.

The majority of optical drives on the market now (March 2018) are 12x BD-ROM, and 18x DVD-ROM.

To be safe, in my code, I set the default max speed at my drives, and allow users to override the drive speed manually to maximize the read speed per second.


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