Kenwood did have drives (which others also sold derivatives of) that would, ideally, do 72x at peak. That was a thing.
They did this by cheating: They would read more than one track from the CD-ROM, concurrently, and in parallel. This is a proper hack, and it worked: It could read a CD at a faster rate, with a slower rotational speed, than many other drives.
I never owned a drive that used the Kenwood method. (I never wanted one; my ideas for high-speed CD reading centered around getting good reads from audio CDs, which was still hairy around that time.)
More-common "52x" (or more) drives just spun the fuck out of the CD. Mu circa-1997 girlfriend had one of those drives in her desktop tower PC, and it always sounded like it was going to disassemble the whole PC when it managed to get spun fully up.
But they never really exceeded 8k RPM. It was just a difference of read methods.
There was CAV, CLV, partial CAV, and other methods -- both for reading, and writing. In reader-space, the documentation wasn't always complete in describing the methods -- it became universal that "faster is better".
My own peak CD-ROM time happened with a Plextor PR-820 burner and a "24x" Plextor reader, both connected with parallel SCSI.
It was very fast for the time, but I was never successful with direct high-speed disc-to-disc copies with this rig. Even with IBM UltraStar 9ES ultra-wide SCSI disks and plenty of RAM, and plenty of time for tweaking -- I just couldn't a a reliable copy possible. (And all of my reported-successful burns were proper, and that was important to me.)
So I rolled on with this rig for a couple of years, when a friend brought over a new pile of PC parts to have me assemble.
And I did assemble the things, and then we did the requisite copying of the Windows CD.
He wanted to copy it at max speed. I was sure it would fail.
Except: He had a fast reader (>32x), and a "32x" burner (which isn't really a thing), and... We put the source disc in the source drive, and the blank disc in the target drive, and it just fuckin' worked. I timed it, and it took 2 minutes and 43 seconds. Both drives spun up like jet engines, and the progress bar just spooled across the screen without a pause in Nero Burning ROM.
It was amazing to observe. And it probably did not exceed 8k RPM on either drive, despite the necessary read/write rates.
Kenwood did have drives (which others also sold derivatives of) that would, ideally, do 72x at peak. That was a thing.
They did this by cheating: They would read more than one track from the CD-ROM, concurrently, and in parallel. This is a proper hack, and it worked: It could read a CD at a faster rate, with a slower rotational speed, than many other drives.
I never owned a drive that used the Kenwood method. (I never wanted one; my ideas for high-speed CD reading centered around getting good reads from audio CDs, which was still hairy around that time.)
More-common "52x" (or more) drives just spun the fuck out of the CD. Mu circa-1997 girlfriend had one of those drives in her desktop tower PC, and it always sounded like it was going to disassemble the whole PC when it managed to get spun fully up.
But they never really exceeded 8k RPM. It was just a difference of read methods.
There was CAV, CLV, partial CAV, and other methods -- both for reading, and writing. In reader-space, the documentation wasn't always complete in describing the methods -- it became universal that "faster is better".
My own peak CD-ROM time happened with a Plextor PR-820 burner and a "24x" Plextor reader, both connected with parallel SCSI.
It was very fast for the time, but I was never successful with direct high-speed disc-to-disc copies with this rig. Even with IBM UltraStar 9ES ultra-wide SCSI disks and plenty of RAM, and plenty of time for tweaking -- I just couldn't a a reliable copy possible. (And all of my reported-successful burns were proper, and that was important to me.)
So I rolled on with this rig for a couple of years, when a friend brought over a new pile of PC parts to have me assemble.
And I did assemble the things, and then we did the requisite copying of the Windows CD.
He wanted to copy it at max speed. I was sure it would fail.
Except: He had a fast reader (>32x), and a "32x" burner (which isn't really a thing), and... We put the source disc in the source drive, and the blank disc in the target drive, and it just fuckin' worked. I timed it, and it took 2 minutes and 43 seconds. Both drives spun up like jet engines, and the progress bar just spooled across the screen without a pause in Nero Burning ROM.
It was amazing to observe. And it probably did not exceed 8k RPM on either drive, despite the necessary read/write rates.
(That was early in 2002, as a reference.)