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[Vieo]

You know, like a harddrive that reads and writes to an optical disk instead of one that's magnetic?

 

[Diablos]

Whenever they do come out, they'll be expensive as all hell.

 

[tenchir]

There are optical drives, they just haven't approach anywhere near the performances(not to mention prices) of the magnetic drives.

 

[ChrisReid]

All the write/rewrite would wear them out with any current technology. Sure you can reburn rewritable CDs an DVDs a hundred times or more.. but the amount of data being continually altered on the hard drive is substantial more. There are going to be better technologies before optical drives become reasonable.

There are optical drives, they just haven't approach anywhere near the performances(not to mention prices) of the magnetic drives.

Yeah, you can even get software that uses your existing writable drive and pretends a disc in it is a hard drive. Like you said, it's not really worthwhile.

 

[Phoenix]

Then there are 'in the lab' drives which are purely optical and use true light for information storage by encoding the data in the lightwave.

 

[arter_2]

what would be the point thiers all ready massive amounts of storage with the current hard drives thier cheap and they work. So if it aint broken why fix it?

 

[Azih]

Plus standard Optical drives are being pushed by the rapidly increasing storage of solid state technologies. If solid state does catch up to the sheer capacity of optical media then they'll take over since solid state has some very singificant advantages.

 

[Culex]

Are optical drives faster at seek/read/write times than magnetic?

 

[Azih]

heck no Optical medi is very very slow. Spinning the disk takes time after all.

The only advantage Optical media has is capacity. It's an extremely significant advantage, but still the only one.

 

[DJ_Tet]

Magnetic drives spin as well, but no, optical drives are MUCH slower than magnetic drives. The spinning has nothing to do with it however.