Speed of packet writing

[Drishmung]

As I, and so many others, are painfully aware, Retrospect uses packet writing mode on CD media (for very good reasons), and many CD-R drives are very slow when doing packet writing.

 

Among the drives that are very slow are (most of?) the drives used by Apple.

 

Dantz has said that this is a 'firmware' issue, so I guess question 1 is:

 

 

Is there any prospect of a firmware update to fix any of these drives?

 

Of course, I could always buy a faster external drive, except that finding out a drive's packet writing speed is very difficult. It almost never seems to be quoted in the spec sheets. However, since Dantz have tested all their qualified drives, and presumably know the packet writing speed:

 

2. could Dantz publish indicative speeds somewhere on their site? (If it's there, I can't find it)

 

What about packet reading speed? The compare speed on my G4 is nothing marvelous, which leads me to wonder

 

3. is packet reading speed similarly crippled on these drives?

 

Thanks.

[Jim_Correia]

FWIW...

 

 

 

I almost exclusively do backups using my DDS-3 tape drive. However, I also have a Yamaha 8424s CDR drive. Using that drive with Retrospect 5.0 on Mac OS 9.2.2 gives me ~50 MB/min backup speeds. On Mac OS X I only get <10 MB/min backup speeds. (The performance of the tape drive and file system backups don't show a huge discrepency between the two os versions.)