this is a question that’s always quietly niggled, but never enough to make me actually find out/ask, until now: how can a blank dvd disk have a maximum speed built into it? what’s the disk got to do with speed? i’d have thought it’d (solely) be the writer which limits that?
Luckily we don’t have this problem anymore… most DVD’s can barely reach past 32x and as for Blu-ray, your lucky if you can even find a recorder that goes past 4x 
I still have a 52x CD burner. I’ve noticed those are very difficult to come by, as the most burners that are available today only have a top speed of 48x. I’m thinking that the problem of CDs explosively shattering at those speeds was probably why they capped it at 48x.
Blank DVD’s come with rated speed which might be a lot lower than the maximum writing capability of your DVD.
I always burn at 4x or 8x max so the chance of my DVD being a coaster is lessened.
Just to put it out there, 6x for DVDs is about the same as 54x for CDs.
right, so the maximum write speed is dictated by the susceptibility to the laser of the stuff on the disk – and different disks have different stuff on them, hense different max write speeds. great, thanks.
The speed has to do with the chemical composition of the disk and how reliably the materials can be heated by the laser to get you your 1’s and 0’s
It probably won’t write if you try to go over the maximum speed anyway it concerns the (re-)writing speed for the media as was mentioned above.
The DVD usually has to adopt a writing mode standard - thus limiting its speed. Even if you had for example; a x22 DVD-RAM Rewriter but the Disc was x16 Max you still couldn’t burn it at x22 - unless you loaded a x22 rated Disc.
It doesn’t have a max speed built into it. The max speed indicates at what speed that particular disc can be written. If you burn at higher speed, it might not give a good result.
As CD drives got faster and faster they discovered a problem once they were spinning the CD at around 56 - 58x.
The problem was that the disk itself would shatter into lots of tiny pieces destroying the drive.