Want to guess where this new hardware news is going to come from? You guessed it, Japan. As always, Japan is showing us how it is done with an event that is sure to make a few headlines. Tom’s Hardware reports that DVD+R DL media is now supporting recording speeds all the way up to 8x!

This is nuts, it seems like just the other day when DVD Burners were first released onto the market with big, fat price tags. As expected though, with the falling prices and the ever increasing speed of the media is heading towards that of their CD-R counterparts.

According to the DVD+RW Alliance, the new standard will allow writing 8.5 GByte of data onto a DVD+R DL in less than 16 minutes, translating into a writing speed of almost nine MByte per second. At the current 2.4x recording speed, the same amount of data requires about 47 minutes to be stored on a DVD+R DL disc. The DVD+RW Alliance expects 8X DVD+R DL media and drives to come to market in the first quarter of next year.