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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

#61

Post by officeplant »

actionfromafar wrote: post #53
Dylan16807 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I miss my first 128mb usb drive. Cost nearly $40 and survived a dozen wash cycles accidently left in my pocket all the time. Now days I've got 64gb drives that seem to shit the bed after a few rounds as a Live-USB linux environment. At least they only cost $15 or less.

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

#62

Post by Fnoord »

avadodin wrote: post #33
parsimo2010 wrote: post #3

I 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, bu…

I thought two-three times. Maybe a dozen. I always treated all kinds of writeable CD/DVDs as if they were one-write and done. To be honest, it hurts every time I write to an SSD drive — which is all of the time these days.

For archiving, DVD is 4 GB and who knows how long the medium will last.

LTO-6 drives go for 300-500 EUR refurbished. You need a FC switch or HBA. Each tape holds 2+ TB uncompressed data.

As for NVMe, if you do a lot of writes (e.g. DB's, Docker), go for enterprise. If you do that, grab one with PLP. You'd use it also as a cache for ZFS.

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

#63

Post by LargoLasskhyfv »

zozbot234 wrote: post #15

DVD±RW is old stuff, I want proper phase-change persistent memory. Bring back Intel Optane and hook it up to a modern, high-performance PCIe bus.

There may be hope for something like that happening, conceptually at least. Underlying technology is different, though:

https://www.heise.de/en/news/Memory-chip-company-FMC-keeps-w...

https://www.ferroelectric-memory.com/technology/

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

#64

Post by sva_ »

avadodin wrote: post #33
parsimo2010 wrote: post #3

I 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, bu…

I thought two-three times. Maybe a dozen. I always treated all kinds of writeable CD/DVDs as if they were one-write and done. To be honest, it hurts every time I write to an SSD drive — which is all of the time these days.

I just checked using $ sudo smartctl -a /dev/nvme0n1

    Percentage Used:                    2%
    Data Units Read:                    7,173,143 [3.67 TB]
    Data Units Written:                 22,666,414 [11.6 TB]
That's after about 2 years of use. I think SSDs can take quite the beating nowadays.

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

#65

Post by Fnoord »

lxgr wrote: post #55
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 t…

Music-wise, lossy compression takes place via a proprietary codec (ATRAC). It isn't viable for data storage (neither was CDR(W)). Trust me, I had data loss due to all of these. Just use LTO with some parity data.

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

#66

Post by fhdkweig »

blue_pants wrote: post #21
ChrisGreenHeur wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Epoxy and brushes? Doesn't it use a special metal layer, and the laser high-heats the spots to make them amorphous (to write) and then low-heats them to crystallize (to erase)?

I think there was intended sarcasm/joke.

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

#67

Post by grishka »

grepfru_it wrote: post #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!

For a nuclear option, delete C:\windows\system32\wua* or move these files somewhere else.

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

#68

Post by GiorgioG »

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.

People who still remember Zip drives! In college I did tech support for Iomega. It was an interesting time ;)

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

#70

Post by lxgr »

Fnoord wrote: post #65
lxgr wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

Music-wise, lossy compression takes place via a proprietary codec (ATRAC). It isn't viable for data storage (neither was CDR(W)). Trust me, I had data loss due to all of these. Just use LTO with some parity data.

Not sure I understand, are you saying that you were using MiniDiscs or other MO media and were experiencing bit rot?

Making ATRAC the exclusive and mandatory codec for MiniDisc Audio was another typical unfortunate Sony move but in my view doesn't discredit the strengths of the physical storage medium.

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