Tested: How Many Times Can a DVD±RW Be Rewritten? Methodology and Results
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Re: Tested: How Many Times Can a DVD±RW Be Rewritten? Methodology and Results
#2[dead]
Re: Tested: How Many Times Can a DVD±RW Be Rewritten? Methodology and Results
#3I love this and I love seeing that it's from 2026 and someone still took the time to do all this testing- it must have been seriously involved because even at 6x it takes a while to fill up a DVD, and then to repeat that hundreds of times on several discs would be an eternity.
I haven't used a DVD+-RW in several years, as wireless file transfer over networks and flash drives handle pretty much all of my needs now, but I sure used the heck out of my DVD writer when I had it. I had no idea these discs could go hundreds of writes before failure, I always got paranoid about reliability and probably never went above 20 writes on a disc.
Edit: at the end of the post the author says, "that’s about 4020 hours across two drives, 5248 burns and both drives are still seemingly operating just fine." What a colossal amount of time.
Re: Tested: How Many Times Can a DVD±RW Be Rewritten? Methodology and Results
#4IIRC, the issue was never how often the DVD-R/W could be rewritten.
The issue was the fact that everybody assumed that the DVD-R/W discs had roughly the same lifetime as actual DVDs and that turned out to be woefully incorrect.
Re: Tested: How Many Times Can a DVD±RW Be Rewritten? Methodology and Results
#5DVD-RWs always seemed like complete magic to me. I had no idea how they worked, or why they worked. I made and wiped DVD-RWs as a teenager dozens of times, because my dad got annoyed that I kept using up all his DVD-R's, so I bought like three DVD-RWs and used them for all my experiments.
I don't think I got anywhere near the limits for any of them, as I don't remember getting any faults from them, but they were always cool to me.
I was also one of the happy few who had a DVD-RAM drive for my desktop as a teenager; I never really understood why DVD-RAM never caught on, because it seemed to work fine for me, and it was kind of nice not having to wipe the disk to erase stuff.
Re: Tested: How Many Times Can a DVD±RW Be Rewritten? Methodology and Results
#6>Windows Updates
If you want to stop windows updates, make your internet connection a metered connection. Updates will only be allowed on-demand.
The more you know!
Re: Tested: How Many Times Can a DVD±RW Be Rewritten? Methodology and Results
#7>Windows Updates If you want to stop windows updates, make your internet connection a metered connection. Updates will only be allowed on-demand. The more you know!
If you have a Pro edition license most things Windows does are a registry key away. The entire policy branch of the registry is designed to have configuration pushed down from the network like when and how to update, but you can also set all of those keys manually.
(Also, no hacking is necessary to set up a Windows Pro install with a local account, just tell it you're going to domain join it.)
Re: Tested: How Many Times Can a DVD±RW Be Rewritten? Methodology and Results
#8>Windows Updates If you want to stop windows updates, make your internet connection a metered connection. Updates will only be allowed on-demand. The more you know!
If you have a Pro edition license most things Windows does are a registry key away. The entire policy branch of the registry is designed to have configuration pushed down from the network like when and how to update, but you can also set all of those keys manually. (Also, no hacking is necessary to set up a Windows Pro install with a local account, just tell it you're going to domain join it.)
One hint for the wary: Don't delay feature updates for the maximum allowed in the group policy editor. I couldn't figure out why I was getting forced reboots for updates despite other policies requiring it to ask permission. Turns out that if the update hits the group policy maximum, it forces an update immediately, other policies be damned.
So set it to the max - 14 days if you want some time to apply updates at your leisure, and you are wary of non-critical updates.
Re: Tested: How Many Times Can a DVD±RW Be Rewritten? Methodology and Results
#9>Windows Updates If you want to stop windows updates, make your internet connection a metered connection. Updates will only be allowed on-demand. The more you know!
If you have a Pro edition license most things Windows does are a registry key away. The entire policy branch of the registry is designed to have configuration pushed down from the network like when and how to update, but you can also set all of those keys manually. (Also, no hacking is necessary to set up a Windows Pro install with a local account, just tell it you're going to domain join it.)
The local account tip is a good one. I used it when setting up Windows 11 Pro on my desktop PC.
Regarding updates: you might not even need to think about registry keys! I found these Windows 10 group policy settings to work well for many years: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18157968 - and I'm still using them with Windows 11, near enough, though it seems you now need to go to "Windows Update\Manage end user experience" to find the Configure Automatic Updates setting I mention.
(I've also switched to using option 2 (Notify for download and auto install) rather than 3 (Auto download and notify for install), on the basis that it sounds safer, and I've had no problems from doing that. Not to say that I actually remember having any problems from letting Windows download the updates ahead of time! - but I'm comfortable living dangerously.)
Re: Tested: How Many Times Can a DVD±RW Be Rewritten? Methodology and Results
#10I didn’t know there was a rewritable dvd format. My dad had a bunch of dvds, I used to love sneaking one off to play on my computer when I was a kid, since he stopped noticing when he got into bluray