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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

#51

Post by bearjaws »

I used to work for a vendor who wrote the drivers for iTunes CD burning, I actually built a in house tool that could take multiple machines with 8 drives each and test our driver by burning to CD-R, DVD-R, DVD-RW, etc... and read the data back to ensure no regressions in our drivers.

Reason for testing so many drives is that when it comes to the real world, a lot of drive manufacturers cut corners and didn't follow standards, so we had a growing list of "work arounds" that we would validate. Every manufacturer would send us their drives to validate, we had a huge closet with shelves floor to ceiling of different drives.

Was a cool internship out of high school an forever thankful that I got it. Even if it's my most boomer skillset.

Couple of main things that post are 100% correct, the brand of media does matter. We actually had specific media we would recommend to the DOD for maximum stability. Second of all faster media always performs worse for archival purposes, and burning faster will result in more errors as well.

For testing we had a specific media for each type we found could be used for 25x tests reliably, but I don't remember the brands/type. We would basically load them once a year since we did a full verification every few weeks.

Re: Tested: How Many Times Can a DVD±RW Be Rewritten? Methodology and Results

#53

Post by actionfromafar »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #25
tombert wrote: post #5

DVD-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 alwa…

I guess the drives just cost too much and so zip won until flash drives took over.

I saw zip adoption before CD-RW, flash drives much later. But maybe it depended on how much data you needed transferred. Early flash drives were much smaller than CD/DVD.

Re: Tested: How Many Times Can a DVD±RW Be Rewritten? Methodology and Results

#55

Post by lxgr »

tombert wrote: post #5

DVD-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 alwa…

They definitely are mysterious, but to me, magneto-optical media (such as MiniDiscs) take the cake.

Written magnetically (while heated by a laser), read optically (by a much weaker laser), and somehow all of that fit into a pocketable player powered for 10+ hours by a single AA battery!?

Unlike rewritable optical media, opto-magnetic storage also seems to have effectively unlimited rewrite cycles. It's a real shame they never became a popular data storage option, mainly due to Sony's paranoia stemming from also owning a huge music and film division.

Re: Tested: How Many Times Can a DVD±RW Be Rewritten? Methodology and Results

#57

Post by Sharlin »

giuliomagnifico wrote: post #12
karlgkk wrote: post #10

I 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

Yes, they were present and not much expensive than standard ones. However, the issue was that they encountered problems/data loss after few rewrites.

Except that according TFA they can actually last thousands of rewrite cycles.

Re: Tested: How Many Times Can a DVD±RW Be Rewritten? Methodology and Results

#58

Post by giuliomagnifico »

Sharlin wrote: post #57
giuliomagnifico wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, they were present and not much expensive than standard ones. However, the issue was that they encountered problems/data loss after few rewrites.

Except that according TFA they can actually last thousands of rewrite cycles.

Indeed, I posted it because my experience was different, perhaps due to my DVD writer or my settings. After 10- 15 rewrites, I almost always encountered issues

Re: Tested: How Many Times Can a DVD±RW Be Rewritten? Methodology and Results

#59

Post by Sharlin »

karlgkk wrote: post #10

I 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

There was actually only a short period of time when only write-once DVDs existed. By 2005 just about any computer DVD drive you could buy supported all combinations of {CD,DVD}±{R,RW} that existed. Blank RW disks were, of course, more expensive than R's, though.

Re: Tested: How Many Times Can a DVD±RW Be Rewritten? Methodology and Results

#60

Post by fc417fc802 »

VorpalWay wrote: post #23
avidiax wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 you…

You could also use an OS that doesn't tend to have dodgy updates that brick your system, such as most Linux distro. Nor force you to update if you don't want to. Funny how a large company like Microsoft can't figure out QA, but volunteer Linux distros with much less resources can. (A lot of Windows specific software works in wine these days, Valve's investment into improving it for games have helped for applications…

> if you are stuck with such software

kvm-qemu, windows image, block network access to the windows update servers, problem solved?

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