About using DVD-RAM
Recently, he was sorting boxes of junk after moving, and stumbled upon a pair of carefully preserved DVD-RAM discs. I remembered where I got them from, and that I even wrote an article on a blog. It’s not forbidden by the rules, so I decided to post it here. Maybe someone will be interested. DVDs have become fashionable for a long time, and a little less than a long time ago they managed to get out of it. Today, using DVDs can damage the image in much the same way as using video cassettes. But they are still being sold and produced. There are many devices equipped with DVD drives. Almost all of them can work with DVD-RAM, although almost no one knows about this standard, and such discs are very difficult to find.
I asked several sellers of large stores if they had at least one available, they asked me again: “DVD-RW? of course have!" - no one even has an approximate idea of what it is, and even more so, never seen it in his eyes. Once upon a time they could be found in Moscow stores, but now they are not there either. However, as they say, in Greece, more precisely, everything is in the European Union. For experiments, I purchased a couple of discs on eBay. They cost almost 20 EUR, 10 for the wheels themselves and the same amount for delivery. Here they are:
They look like regular DVDs, only the surface is golden. What's the point? The fact that they can be written on as a regular removable media. No special programs (such as Nero), drivers, sessions, etc. are needed. We insert the disk into the drive and use it as usual through any program that can work with files. Like in the good old days with a floppy disk. Or as with a flash drive, although the flash drive is still a little different, this is a complete device with its own controller that emulates a hard drive. And here nothing is emulated. You can easily delete any file, open for editing and all that. Modern OS support DVD-RAM, there should be no problems. They also promise increased reliability, durability and resistance to external influences. It’s understandable: there are no mechanical parts, electronics, too, so you can shake, wet, touch with your hands (the instruction prohibits all this, but you can neatly). There are advantages, in short.
Disks can be formatted in Windows. At first I formatted in FAT32 under Windows XP. The process was successful in a few minutes. Files can really be copied directly to the drive, which I had never seen before :). True, everything works extremely slowly. So slow that it’s impossible to use. Although copying occurs at a speed of about 1 MB / s, the access time is so long that it feels like it is not a disk, but a magnetic tape. The recording of the file folder continued for about 15 minutes. All this time the drive rustled with the disk. The record itself is also depressing, it was possible to copy only small portions of small files (a few megabytes in total), something more serious caused confusion for a period of an hour or more. Most likely the matter is in FAT32, which is not too suitable for the physical structure of the disk.
Therefore, I took Windows 7 and formatted the disk in UDF version 2.01, which she proposed by default. After that, the situation improved. Access time has ceased to be unreasonable, the drive is now responding, though it’s still slow, like a very heavily loaded hard drive, but it became possible to work with it at least somehow. Copy speed starts from megabytes per second and gradually drops to (attention!) 140 KB / s. This is very depressing. Of course, the data is written and read right there (but what about, for verification, because reliability), but still it is very, very small by today's standards. In relation to volume, this is the slowest medium in history, probably only punch cards are slower. Of the disk devices, by far the slowest ever seen. Copying 4 GB took about 6 hours. The average speed is about 150 kilobytes per second! The interesting thing is that if you copy in small portions with pauses, then everything is much more fun, although it still feels like you are working with a giant floppy disk. By the way, the disk sizes really exceed all expectations. Here's what Windows 7 showed:
The free volume was determined correctly, and for some reason the occupied volume is 10 times more than what is actually occupied. Of course, in fact, the full amount is a little over 4.3 GB, just the operating system displays it incorrectly.
Now it’s clear why DVD-RAM is not popular. The capacity is not happy, the speed is close to zero. If you need to transmit information, it is easier to use communication channels, since now even the mobile Internet has comparable speed. For backups, in principle, it is possible if the amount of data is small. Suppose, for example, that you occasionally need to reserve small portions of data on a removable disk medium, for example, for security reasons, then DVD-RAM will do. But this situation is more hypothetical than practical. Also, in principle, you can record a session of the same Nero onto a RAM disk, turning it into a regular DVD, but then the main point of the idea is lost. Yes, survivability will be higher, but the general idea still looks doubtful. The media will not provide guaranteed reliability anyway, and the benefits are eaten up by the price and low availability of the disks. Also, a flash drive of the same size is cheaper than a RAM disk, and buying a place in the cloud or raising a file server for backups is even more profitable, simpler and faster :). The sense of DVD-RAM is now even less than that of floppy disks, which are sometimes needed for older machines, because they were once a mass standard. But DVD-RAM did not become such a standard. The technology is virtually unsuitable for use in the computer field. Drives are in demand only for exotic devices such as DVD recorders, where TV programs are recorded on them, and soon, probably, they will no longer be needed at all, because they too have long switched to hard drives or flash memory. which are sometimes needed for old cars because they were once a mass standard. But DVD-RAM did not become such a standard. The technology is virtually unsuitable for use in the computer field. Drives are in demand only for exotic devices such as DVD recorders, where TV programs are recorded on them, and soon, probably, they will no longer be needed at all, because they too have long switched to hard drives or flash memory. which are sometimes needed for old cars because they were once a mass standard. But DVD-RAM did not become such a standard. The technology is virtually unsuitable for use in the computer field. Drives are in demand only for exotic devices such as DVD recorders, where TV programs are recorded on them, and soon, probably, they will no longer be needed at all, because they too have long switched to hard drives or flash memory.
PS I do not indicate the drive model used for the tests, because they were different drives on different machines - everywhere the disks behaved approximately the same.
I asked several sellers of large stores if they had at least one available, they asked me again: “DVD-RW? of course have!" - no one even has an approximate idea of what it is, and even more so, never seen it in his eyes. Once upon a time they could be found in Moscow stores, but now they are not there either. However, as they say, in Greece, more precisely, everything is in the European Union. For experiments, I purchased a couple of discs on eBay. They cost almost 20 EUR, 10 for the wheels themselves and the same amount for delivery. Here they are:
They look like regular DVDs, only the surface is golden. What's the point? The fact that they can be written on as a regular removable media. No special programs (such as Nero), drivers, sessions, etc. are needed. We insert the disk into the drive and use it as usual through any program that can work with files. Like in the good old days with a floppy disk. Or as with a flash drive, although the flash drive is still a little different, this is a complete device with its own controller that emulates a hard drive. And here nothing is emulated. You can easily delete any file, open for editing and all that. Modern OS support DVD-RAM, there should be no problems. They also promise increased reliability, durability and resistance to external influences. It’s understandable: there are no mechanical parts, electronics, too, so you can shake, wet, touch with your hands (the instruction prohibits all this, but you can neatly). There are advantages, in short.
Testing
Disks can be formatted in Windows. At first I formatted in FAT32 under Windows XP. The process was successful in a few minutes. Files can really be copied directly to the drive, which I had never seen before :). True, everything works extremely slowly. So slow that it’s impossible to use. Although copying occurs at a speed of about 1 MB / s, the access time is so long that it feels like it is not a disk, but a magnetic tape. The recording of the file folder continued for about 15 minutes. All this time the drive rustled with the disk. The record itself is also depressing, it was possible to copy only small portions of small files (a few megabytes in total), something more serious caused confusion for a period of an hour or more. Most likely the matter is in FAT32, which is not too suitable for the physical structure of the disk.
Therefore, I took Windows 7 and formatted the disk in UDF version 2.01, which she proposed by default. After that, the situation improved. Access time has ceased to be unreasonable, the drive is now responding, though it’s still slow, like a very heavily loaded hard drive, but it became possible to work with it at least somehow. Copy speed starts from megabytes per second and gradually drops to (attention!) 140 KB / s. This is very depressing. Of course, the data is written and read right there (but what about, for verification, because reliability), but still it is very, very small by today's standards. In relation to volume, this is the slowest medium in history, probably only punch cards are slower. Of the disk devices, by far the slowest ever seen. Copying 4 GB took about 6 hours. The average speed is about 150 kilobytes per second! The interesting thing is that if you copy in small portions with pauses, then everything is much more fun, although it still feels like you are working with a giant floppy disk. By the way, the disk sizes really exceed all expectations. Here's what Windows 7 showed:
The free volume was determined correctly, and for some reason the occupied volume is 10 times more than what is actually occupied. Of course, in fact, the full amount is a little over 4.3 GB, just the operating system displays it incorrectly.
Now it’s clear why DVD-RAM is not popular. The capacity is not happy, the speed is close to zero. If you need to transmit information, it is easier to use communication channels, since now even the mobile Internet has comparable speed. For backups, in principle, it is possible if the amount of data is small. Suppose, for example, that you occasionally need to reserve small portions of data on a removable disk medium, for example, for security reasons, then DVD-RAM will do. But this situation is more hypothetical than practical. Also, in principle, you can record a session of the same Nero onto a RAM disk, turning it into a regular DVD, but then the main point of the idea is lost. Yes, survivability will be higher, but the general idea still looks doubtful. The media will not provide guaranteed reliability anyway, and the benefits are eaten up by the price and low availability of the disks. Also, a flash drive of the same size is cheaper than a RAM disk, and buying a place in the cloud or raising a file server for backups is even more profitable, simpler and faster :). The sense of DVD-RAM is now even less than that of floppy disks, which are sometimes needed for older machines, because they were once a mass standard. But DVD-RAM did not become such a standard. The technology is virtually unsuitable for use in the computer field. Drives are in demand only for exotic devices such as DVD recorders, where TV programs are recorded on them, and soon, probably, they will no longer be needed at all, because they too have long switched to hard drives or flash memory. which are sometimes needed for old cars because they were once a mass standard. But DVD-RAM did not become such a standard. The technology is virtually unsuitable for use in the computer field. Drives are in demand only for exotic devices such as DVD recorders, where TV programs are recorded on them, and soon, probably, they will no longer be needed at all, because they too have long switched to hard drives or flash memory. which are sometimes needed for old cars because they were once a mass standard. But DVD-RAM did not become such a standard. The technology is virtually unsuitable for use in the computer field. Drives are in demand only for exotic devices such as DVD recorders, where TV programs are recorded on them, and soon, probably, they will no longer be needed at all, because they too have long switched to hard drives or flash memory.
PS I do not indicate the drive model used for the tests, because they were different drives on different machines - everywhere the disks behaved approximately the same.