Tested: How Many Times Can a DVD±RW Be Rewritten? Methodology and Results • Hacker News Board

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

#91

Post by parsimo2010 » Fri, Mar 13, 2026, 1:03 AM UTC

rlv-dan wrote: post #13

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 wrote an article in a similar vein some years ago that might interest you too: https://www.rlvision.com/blog/how-long-do-writable-cddvd-las...

Thanks, I read your article and my main reaction is that I'm saddened by the loss of data on those few unreadable discs. I hope it wasn't something you'll need to dig up in a few years.

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

#92

Post by Fnoord » Fri, Mar 13, 2026, 2:52 AM UTC

wolvoleo wrote: post #87

Fnoord wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Fibre channel HBAs really cost peanuts. Because there's tons on the second hand market and the only ones who want them are enterprises who don't buy second hand shit without a support contract (they usually dump them when the support is up, that's why there's so many working ones on the market) So I get €300 cards for €20, it's a joke. Really great though because they're really amazing for tying storage together and…

I made a mistake in my post. I meant to say FC HBA or SAS HBA. I went with a SAS one which I use with a HBA, but the FC ones were cheaper (both FC LTO drives as well as FC HBAs) but would've still required a FC switch). I already got some fiber through my house though, so it'd have worked well. But I went with SAS which was considerably more expensive. 40 dB ain't fun, indeed. I put my LTO drive in the fuse box.

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

#93

Post by edward28 » Fri, Mar 13, 2026, 4:42 AM UTC

sva_ wrote: post #64

avadodin wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

    Percentage Used:                    13%
    Data Units Read:                    686,519,123 [351 TB]
    Data Units Written:                 358,581,477 [183 TB]

4 years of gaming :P.

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

#94

Post by Fnoord » Fri, Mar 13, 2026, 3:55 PM UTC

lxgr wrote: post #82

Fnoord wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, I wasn't being specific. I like a specific music genre, and within this music genre some unique content was saved to DAT and Minidisc. The DATs were lost, and so the only available medium has been based on Minidisc.

So your data only survived in a lossy format, because MiniDisc, but it did survive, also because MiniDisc? The quintessential MiniDisc experience :)

That's the thing. It wasn't me. Someone in the scene received it from original artist, and he put it on minidisc, this was end 90s. Those who appreciate the genre, love these hidden gems, but it is only available as lossy due to minidisc (and MP3). Back then, FLAC did not yet exist, but CD did. Regarding MP3, codecs (including LAME) improved a lot over the years. The overal quality of the LAME presets, nowadays (and this has been tge way for more tgan a decade), is good enough compared to lossless, something double blind tests confirm.

In this case, I believe you are right: I don't think the data would've survived without minidisc. But in other circumstances where the user did not know minidisc is lossy?

In the end, a lot of these hidden gems have been (re)released because lost tapes (and, I suppose, HDDs) were found which is neat.