I was thinking up ideas on a perfect game console, and when i thought of a way to make load times quicker for the CD, i wasnt sure how accurate it was.
Here is the idea:
I thought of having 2 lasers, one on each end of the disc, so that while one was reading the information, the other was getting ready to read information. So if lets say you are at a menu and an option you choose would usually have a load time, would a second laser taking over at that point reduce the load time?
There are CDROMs that use a laser, parallel beam “splitting” technigue to provide very fast read times but if you are going to double (or otherwise substantially increase by whatever method) the bandwidth of streaming data the console has to process to give you faster loading/access etc there are potential associated engineering improvements you would need to make in data buffers, processing power etc. You could probably approximate your goal with an array reading CDROM but the cost vs performance gain might not make the cut vs the added cost (possibly substantial) to implement a slight faster load time.
"Kenwood UCR004010 CD-ROM
Enter Zen Research, Inc. Zen hit upon an innovative solution: Why not read tracks in parallel? Using a combination of optics and signal processing, Zen’s “TrueX” multi-beam technology reads seven CD-ROM tracks in parallel, a great step beyond the conventional single-beam laser used in today’s optical mediums. In Zen’s mechanism, a single laser is diffracted and split into seven beams, each illuminating seven independent tracks all read in parallel through a multi-beam detector. The parallel data is then ordered into a conventional single bitstream through signal processing."