CD and DVD Writing Speed - CD, DVD and Blu-ray Writing Speeds

CD, DVD and Blu-ray Writing Speeds

Modern compact discs support a writing speed of 52X and higher, with some modern DVDs supporting speeds of 16X and higher. It is important to note that the speed of writing a DVD at 1X (1,385,000 bytes per second) is approximately 9 times as compared to writing a CD at 1X (153,600 bytes per second). However, the actual speeds depend on the type of data being written to the disc.

For Blu-ray discs, 1x speed is defined as 36 megabits per second (Mbit/s), which is equal to 4.5 megabytes per second (MB/s). However, as the minimum required data transfer rate for Blu-ray movie discs is 54 Mbit/s, the minimum speed for a Blu-ray drive intended for commercial movie playback should be 2X.

Historically, the 1X writing speed is equivalent to the 1X reading speed, which in turn represents the speed at which a piece of media can be read in its entirety - 74 minutes. Those 74 minutes come from the maximum playtime that the Red Book (audio CD standard) specifies for a digital audio CD (CD-DA); although now, most recordable CDs can hold 80 minutes worth of data. The DVD and Blu-ray discs hold a higher capacity of data, so reading or writing those discs in the same 74-minute time-frame requires a higher data transfer rate.