Imagine if you could burn a CD at 56x. How long does it take to write a full CD then? Two minutes? Or imagine faster speeds.... 84x.... 100x? Is the day comming where you will be able to write a full 650 MB to a CD in less than one minute? In ten seconds?
Well, according at a post at PCMAG.COM (which is here), apparently not in any time soon:

"I've recently been over in Taiwan, and the manufacturers don't have a road map for 56X," says Brad Yeager, a marketing manager at Memorex. "In order to make 56X blank media, you need a much flatter disc and new molding, which costs more."

Apparently, we face the same problem now as we did in 1998, where it just wasn't profitable to create media and drives that performed reliably at increasing speeds. Things seem to have reached a bit of a plateau for now in the CD-R arena. And it will probably take a consumer market that demands to be able to write faster before we will see these increasing speeds. More here.

Personally, its a rare day that I find CD-R media that writes faster than 24x anyway. Meaning that I should have just gone for the much cheaper 24x CD-R writer and not the 48x. What about you?

yes. I agree. Now those 52x CDRW are already released. and I have never bought a CDRW, because I know, the speed will drastically increase from 8-12-24-48, then reach 52x. then i buy. because even if it could exceed 52x, possibly 56x, this sutble difference has no big impact on the writing time. and it is very impossible to increase any more. so CDRW reached its limit. and buying now the 52x will last quite long than buying early the 24x or 40x.

If only DVD writing speeds increased as fast as CD-R has, that and a decrease in cost would definitely make me buy one.

But the film companies probably have some influence in this, and that is why the prices are staying over £200 to stop mass pirating of DVDs, the same way there was mass pirating of audio CDs when CD Burners became sub £100.

It takes some time to start burning and writing the table of contents (also called fixating), so the real time difference is less than a minute in one CD, I think. My 24x burner is fast enough for me.

Yeah... 24x is fine... unless I was opening my own stall in a market selling pirated software....

My 24 is fine by me, it gets things done in 4 minutes, which isn't too shabby.

I also feel that it has reached a limit as to how fast they willl become. Seriously how realisitc is it to burn something in 20 seconds? Is that really necessary?

After reading a number of articles on the fragility of CDs at super high speeds, I'm thinking they might have to switch to super dense plastic or kevlar to make those things work.

CDs are a dying technology, and much like the floppy I believe they have seen their day. When you start seeing games that take up over 5 discs, it's time to move on to DVD (at the very least), and possible newer technologies in the near future.

I read a while ago about how they were going to make Hologram layered disks. These would incorporate holograms on top of each other and have up to 10 layers, if I remember correctly. They would hold 5 times a DVD. It is only a matter of time. Let me see if I can't find this article or something like it. I'll post back tonight sometime.

I'm using Memorex 16x rated media with my Lite-On 40x burner and consistently burn successful at 40x.

Here is a link on ZDNET that talks about it, I'll look for more. I think it is pretty interesting.

Says it will hold 100GB of data

Another one from CNet with the company designing them.

I posted this in the IRC channel on what happens to CDs at high speeds, Rick was correct with Kevlar helping, but unless you put that into the disk it doesn't help much (disk warps) and that would be expensive to incorporate it into the disk itself.
http://www.paintbug.com/cdexplode/