[bradoesch]

Something I've always wondered: How come iMacs have 24X CD-ROMS? I mean, 24X are old, why not 40? I know that they never reach their max speed, but why aren't they faster than 24X? The odd time I have to use my PC, I *sort of* envy it's 40X cd-rom, becuase it is much faster. Anyway, just wanted to know!!

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Why 1984, won't be
like "1984"

[Misha]

I'm not sure a slot-loading 24x mechanism exists, although it probably does.

Cost cutting. A 40x drive may cost Apple another five bucks. Multiply that by two millions iMacs and that's 10 million dollars of lost revenue. They figure that 24x is probably more than sufficent for any use, anyway.

[seanyepez]

Misha said it. A 24x (maximum) drive is almost as fast as a 40x (maximum) drive. The only drive that you'll see an awesome difference in performance is Kenwood's TrueX drives. Though they spin at a low 8x, they read 72x everywhere on the disk - not just the farthest outer tracks. This is because they use CAV technology, and seven read heads.

Hopefully Apple will introduce faster drives into their computers in the future. It is also a marketing thing.

Perhaps your 40x drive is not that much faster, but you percieve it faster. The Mac OS, to me, doesn't seem as fast as Windows, but I definitely feel the power of the Mac when I'm using processor-intensive programs like Adobe Photoshop and Premiere.

Misha, I believe you meant "I'm not sure a slot-loading 40x mechanism exists, although it probably does." 24x slot-loading drives are in the second-generation iMac.

Yeah, I know. Too much work...

Where I would like faster performance is reading not media, but DVD media. I'd love a buffer for my DVD movies to play smoothly just in case I encounter turbulence in an airplane and for faster reading of fast-action scenes. The movie will able to play off the hard disk, thus reducing DVD access. Software decoding should be faster in those scenes. Kind of like this: the DVD copies the next 100 megabytes of movie to the hard disk (and perhaps the RAM, if you have enough...) where it is decoded so you don't have those freezing-up problems in fast-action scenes.

[Kozmik]

seanyepex, I actually find MacOS 9.04 on my iMac DV SE to be blazingly fast. Much faster than Windows98 on any PCs I've used it on.

[blizaine]

I'll agree with Kozmik. I have a 500Mhz PIII at work and my iMacDVSE feels faster in every task it does, especially moving and coping files from fold to folder. On a PC, you can just feel DOS churning away underneath the OS and it feels very unresponsive.

Back to the topic... I've actually timed my internal 24x slot drive against my external 8x4x32x QPS firewire drive, and the external 32x drive is WAY faster. The test's I did were straight audio CD rips. When it would take my internal drive 22 seconds to rip a song, it would only take my 32x external drive 10 seconds for the same song. That's over twice as fast! That leads me to believe that my internal iMac drive is only reading at about 16x.

note: both rips where done with Toast CD Extractor with Overlay off.

[P]

The speed difference between 24x and 40x minimal - the 40x takes forever to spin up, which often makes it slower overall - but the noise difference is huge. I like my iMac nice and quiet, just as it is.

[Feathers]

40x isn't even twice as fast. Another case of the triumph of marketing over common sense. Guess we could hark back to that famous thread about cars, engines, cubic capacity, BHP etc.

In any event the descriptions are abitrary, if not nonsensical, some manufacturers quote a peak, others a sustained and so forth.

I would also guess that there's considerably more to Bliz's experience than just drive speed.