Just as we've all invested in hardware and labeled all our CD-Rs and CD-RWs, ExtremeTech's Mark Hachman raises the spectre of obsolescence.

But executives at drive and media companies say market conditions are similar to 1998, when CD-ROM makers realized that CD-ROM media began to wear and potentially crack at higher speeds, and that the number of manufacturers in the market made developing faster drives an unprofitable proposition. While some are projecting 56X as the next speed increment, most are questioning the need to drive write-once speeds higher.

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