ZEN Multibeam CD/DVD drives?

Silencing hard drives, optical drives and other storage devices

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scalar
Posts: 90
Joined: Sat May 17, 2003 12:54 am

ZEN Multibeam CD/DVD drives?

Post by scalar » Wed Nov 19, 2003 12:03 pm

A few years ago, a company was making a product known as ZEN CD drivers. It used multiple laser beams to read about 8 tracks of a CD simultaneously, and thus give an 8x increase in read speed over a drive running at the same speed as the ZEN.

For those seeking quiet, low CD RPM, ZEN multibeam is the way to go. Unfortunately ZEN suffered an untimely death and disappeared in about 2000, though I have no idea why.

Perhaps it is time to petition the companies that made it to restart production, for use in quiet/silent PCs.

Zen Research Licenses TrueX DVD Technology to Infineon and Sanyo
(December 1999 - Zen Research website is defunct)

Kenwood 72X CD-ROM
(From 2001 - Kenwood Tech website is defunct)


-Scalar
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lenny
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Post by lenny » Wed Nov 19, 2003 12:21 pm

There were reports of compatibility and of drives failing after a while. I don't have one, so this is NOT from first hand experience.

As an alternative, consider Daemon Tools : http://www.daemon-tools.cc (web site was down when I tried, but do a google search for mirrors). It allows you to mount a CD image from hard disk and emulates a CDROM drive. Much faster and quieter.
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Fabool
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Location: Finland

Post by Fabool » Wed Nov 19, 2003 12:30 pm

I have a Kenwood 52x drive, it was a good drive.
Notice how I said was, it's dead now, no idea why but when you insert a cd-rom it just emits a horrible loud sound for a while and does nothing afterwards, also does the same thing when booting the computer. So what lenny said might very well be true :)
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wumpus
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Post by wumpus » Wed Nov 19, 2003 6:45 pm

The Zen multi-beam drives were great in concept, but HORRIBLE in execution. Maybe too complex? Tremendous failure rates, and abysmal media compatibility.

And I'm saying this as a guy who owned two-- both died.
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Ducky
Posts: 86
Joined: Fri Jan 17, 2003 8:22 pm
Location: Plano, TX

Re: ZEN Multibeam CD/DVD drives?

Post by Ducky » Sun Nov 23, 2003 9:16 am

scalar wrote:A few years ago, a company was making a product known as ZEN CD drivers. It used multiple laser beams to read about 8 tracks of a CD simultaneously, and thus give an 8x increase in read speed over a drive running at the same speed as the ZEN.

For those seeking quiet, low CD RPM, ZEN multibeam is the way to go. Unfortunately ZEN suffered an untimely death and disappeared in about 2000, though I have no idea why.
Oh, oh, I know, I know...

I have one of these drives -- main problem was the implementation.
The drive casing had no ventilation and the components in there gets quite hot when the beam comes on -- and it comes on even if it just has a CD sitting in there idling. :roll:

Because of that, the drives die after about a year of normal use -- actually, most of them die after 10-11 months. Since they have a 1-year waranty on these things, most people got a replacement when they called in about the dead drives. Soooo.... I guess they went under because of that. Too many replacements... :(

It'd have been good if they managed to find a decent way to cool this, though.
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