Speedier DVD

By May of this year you might just see DVD drives that are twice as fast. According to an article in PC World it's all about higher powered laser diodes.

The new components can deliver power levels of 100 milliwatts in pulses, making them around 40 percent more powerful than the 70-milliwatt types used for 2X drives. The means data will be able to written to the disk at a rate of 44 mbps, speeding up the time taken to write an entire 4.7 GB disk to around 14 minutes. Double-speed drives take twice as long and single-speed drives take almost an hour to carry out the same task.