High‐speed and multiple‐disc CDROM drives
Howard Falk · The Electronic Library · 1995
As CDROMs become a mass medium for entertainment and reference, the prices of CDROM discs have been dropping while the speed of CDROM drives has been increasing. For example, Essex Entertainment is now marketing 50 CDROM titles through music, book and budget retail stores at $9.95 per disc. Two years ago, the street price of single‐speed single‐disc CDROM drives was in the range of $200–400. Today, a similar drive that runs four times as fast (quad‐speed) can be purchased for about the same price. Meanwhile, sextuple‐speed drives are already available and there is no indication that the limits of CDROM drive speed have as yet been reached. This article discusses both quad‐speed and sextuple‐speed CDROM disc drives, and it also takes note of the many types of multiple disc drives that are being offered — some able to deploy hundreds of CDROM discs for almost instant use by equally large numbers of users.