disc drive speed

[rthmjohn]

I've always wondered how speed of a drive is measured. When you're burning a disc and the computer says the drive is writing at 24x, how fast is this in terms of information per unit of time?

[5614]

See here:

 

http://www.computerhope.com/issues/ch000219.htm

 

Basically assuming it is a newer disk then the disk rotates at a constant speed the whole time, so a 32x disk means the data can be accessed 32 times (on what I assume would be 1 rotation of the disk) however as you get towards the middle of the disk this number decreases.