I was thinking about the fact that in the last years I have never seen CDs and DVDs supporting writing/reading speeds higher than 52X and 16X, respectively.
Is this a commercial choice (i.e. manufacturers don't care about optical discs anymore and focus more on flash memories and SSD drives) or a technical limitation (i.e. optical drives cannot support higher writing and reading speeds)?
Best Answer
It's mostly a technical limitation. Put simply, if you spin the disk too fast it starts to become unstable and wobble around or even start to come apart under the sheer stress. At best this means read/write errors - and at worse means the possibility of it coming loose and causing damage.
At 52x speed, the disk is spinning at around 24000 RPM - at around 27000 RPM the disk would start to crack.