The Mythbusters Episode That Happened To Me!

reply to post by TheLotLizard


Sorry to go off topic just a little. But are you sure that game wasn't called "Titanic: Adventure out of Time"? A point and click adventure game that was pretty fun to play back in the day.

reply to post by Dustytoad


If that comment is truly from 2002, then it has been wrong for 11 years.

From Wikipedia article CD-ROM:

Common data transfer speeds for CD-ROM drives
Transfer speed KiB/s Mbit/s MiB/s [10] RPM
1× 150 1.2288 0.146 200–500
2× 300 2.4576 0.293 400-1,000
4× 600 4.9152 0.586 800–2,000
8× 1,200 9.8304 1.17 1,600–4,000
10× 1,500 12.288 1.46 2,000–5,000
12× 1,800 14.7456 1.76 2,400–6,000
20× 1,200–3,000 up to 24.576 up to 2.93 4,000 (CAV)
32× 1,920–4,800 up to 39.3216 up to 4.69 4,800 (CAV)
36× 2,160–5,400 up to 44.2368 up to 5.27 7,200 (CAV)
40× 2,400–6,000 up to 49.152 up to 5.86 8,000 (CAV)
48× 2,880–7,200 up to 58.9824 up to 7.03 9,600 (CAV)
52× 3,120–7,800 up to 63.8976 up to 7.62 10,400 (CAV)
56× 3,360–8,400 up to 68.8128 up to 8.20 11,200 (CAV)
72× 6,750–10,800 up to 88.4736 up to 10.5 2,000 (multi-beam)

The formatting makes that a bit difficult to read, but a 48x speed relates to 9,600rpm and 52x is 10,400rpm.

Manufacturers voluntarily limited themselves to 48x or 52x because they were indeed seeing occasional media failures at these speeds. Emphasis on 'occasional' - they were extremely rare - but not unknown.

The issue was not what operating system was in use, the issue was the rotation speed of the hardware. Win95 and Win 98 were in large scale use long after 48x and 52x drives were common, just as WinXP is still quite common.