About using DVD-RAM
Recently I took apart boxes with junk after the move, and came across a couple of carefully preserved DVD-RAM discs. He remembered where they came from me and even wrote a blog article. Rules like not prohibited, so I decided to post here. Perhaps someone will be interested. DVDs became fashionable long ago, and a little less long ago they managed to get out of it. Today, using a DVD can damage image in much the same way as using videotapes. But they are still 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 such a standard, and such disks are very difficult to find.
I asked several sellers of large stores if they had at least one, they asked me again: “DVD-RW? of course there is! ”- no one even has no approximate idea of what it is, and even more so has never seen it before. Once upon a time they could be found in Moscow stores, but now they are no longer there. However, as they say, in Greece, more precisely in the European Union everything is there. For the experiences I purchased a pair of discs on eBay. They cost almost 20 EUR, 10 for the discs themselves and as much for the 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 as an ordinary removable media. No special programs (like Nero), drivers, sessions, etc. are needed. We insert the disc into the drive and use it as usual through any program capable of working with files. Like the good old days with a floppy disk. Or as with a flash drive, although the flash drive is still a bit different, this is a full-fledged device with its controller that emulates a hard disk. And here nothing is emulated. You can easily delete any file, open for editing and all that. Modern operating systems support DVD-RAM, problems should not arise. Also promise increased reliability, durability and resistance to external influences. This is understandable: there are no mechanical parts, electronics, too, so you can shake, wet, touch your hands (the instruction prohibits all this, but you can neatly). There are pluses, in short.
')
Disks can be formatted in Windows. At first I formatted it in FAT32 under Windows XP. The process was successful, in a few minutes. Files can actually be copied directly to the drive, which I have never seen before:). True, everything works very slowly. So slow that it is impossible to use. Although copying occurs at a rate of about 1 MB / s, the access time is so great that it feels like it is not a disk, but a magnetic tape. Cancellation of the folder with the files I lasted for about 15 minutes. All this time the disk drive rustled disk. The recording itself is also depressing, it was possible to copy only small portions of small files (a total of several megabytes), something more serious caused confusion for a period of an hour or more. Most likely the case in FAT32, which is not very suitable for the physical structure of the disk. The DVD was originally intended for the UDF file system, but the trouble is that Windows NT 5.x does not support formatting in UDF.
So I took Windows 7 and formatted the disk in UDF version 2.01, which it offered by default. After that, the situation has improved. The access time has ceased to be unreasonable, the disk now responds, though it’s still slow, like a very hard-loaded hard disk, but it became possible to work with it at least somehow. Copy speed starts with a megabyte per second and gradually drops to (attention!) 140 KB / s. It is very depressing. Of course, the data is written and immediately read (and how, for verification, for reliability), but still it is very, very little by today's standards. In relation to volume, it is the slowest medium in history, slower, probably, only punched cards. Of the disk devices is uniquely the slowest of all 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 you still feel that you are working with a giant floppy disk. By the way, the size of the disk really exceeds all expectations. Here is what Windows 7 showed:
The free volume was determined correctly, but for some reason, occupied for some reason is 10 times more than actually occupied. Of course, in fact, the full volume of a little more than 4.3 GB, just the operating system displays it incorrectly.
Now I understand why DVD-RAM is not popular. Capacity is not happy, the speed is close to zero. If you need to transmit information, it is easier to use communication channels, the benefit now even the mobile Internet has a comparable speed. For backups, in principle, it is possible, if the amount of data is small. Let, for example, it is necessary to occasionally reserve small portions of data on removable disk media, 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 on a RAM disk, turning it into a regular DVD, but then the main point of the idea is lost. Yes, the vitality will be higher, but the general idea still looks doubtful. The carrier will not guarantee guaranteed reliability anyway, and the benefit is eaten up by the price and low availability of disks. In addition, a flash drive of the same volume is cheaper than a RAM disk, and buying space in the cloud or raising a file server for backups is even more profitable, easier and faster:). The sense of DVD-RAM is even less than that of floppy disks, which are sometimes needed for old machines, because they were once a mass standard. And DVD-RAM did not become such a standard. The technology is virtually unsuitable for use in the computer field. Disks are only in demand for exotic devices such as DVD recorders, where TV programs are recorded on them, and soon, probably, they won't be needed at all, because they have also been transferred to hard drives or flash memory for a long time.
PS I do not indicate the drive model used for the tests, because they were different drives on different machines — the drives behaved approximately the same everywhere.
I asked several sellers of large stores if they had at least one, they asked me again: “DVD-RW? of course there is! ”- no one even has no approximate idea of what it is, and even more so has never seen it before. Once upon a time they could be found in Moscow stores, but now they are no longer there. However, as they say, in Greece, more precisely in the European Union everything is there. For the experiences I purchased a pair of discs on eBay. They cost almost 20 EUR, 10 for the discs themselves and as much for the 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 as an ordinary removable media. No special programs (like Nero), drivers, sessions, etc. are needed. We insert the disc into the drive and use it as usual through any program capable of working with files. Like the good old days with a floppy disk. Or as with a flash drive, although the flash drive is still a bit different, this is a full-fledged device with its controller that emulates a hard disk. And here nothing is emulated. You can easily delete any file, open for editing and all that. Modern operating systems support DVD-RAM, problems should not arise. Also promise increased reliability, durability and resistance to external influences. This is understandable: there are no mechanical parts, electronics, too, so you can shake, wet, touch your hands (the instruction prohibits all this, but you can neatly). There are pluses, in short.
')
Testing
Disks can be formatted in Windows. At first I formatted it in FAT32 under Windows XP. The process was successful, in a few minutes. Files can actually be copied directly to the drive, which I have never seen before:). True, everything works very slowly. So slow that it is impossible to use. Although copying occurs at a rate of about 1 MB / s, the access time is so great that it feels like it is not a disk, but a magnetic tape. Cancellation of the folder with the files I lasted for about 15 minutes. All this time the disk drive rustled disk. The recording itself is also depressing, it was possible to copy only small portions of small files (a total of several megabytes), something more serious caused confusion for a period of an hour or more. Most likely the case in FAT32, which is not very suitable for the physical structure of the disk. The DVD was originally intended for the UDF file system, but the trouble is that Windows NT 5.x does not support formatting in UDF.
So I took Windows 7 and formatted the disk in UDF version 2.01, which it offered by default. After that, the situation has improved. The access time has ceased to be unreasonable, the disk now responds, though it’s still slow, like a very hard-loaded hard disk, but it became possible to work with it at least somehow. Copy speed starts with a megabyte per second and gradually drops to (attention!) 140 KB / s. It is very depressing. Of course, the data is written and immediately read (and how, for verification, for reliability), but still it is very, very little by today's standards. In relation to volume, it is the slowest medium in history, slower, probably, only punched cards. Of the disk devices is uniquely the slowest of all 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 you still feel that you are working with a giant floppy disk. By the way, the size of the disk really exceeds all expectations. Here is what Windows 7 showed:
The free volume was determined correctly, but for some reason, occupied for some reason is 10 times more than actually occupied. Of course, in fact, the full volume of a little more than 4.3 GB, just the operating system displays it incorrectly.
Now I understand why DVD-RAM is not popular. Capacity is not happy, the speed is close to zero. If you need to transmit information, it is easier to use communication channels, the benefit now even the mobile Internet has a comparable speed. For backups, in principle, it is possible, if the amount of data is small. Let, for example, it is necessary to occasionally reserve small portions of data on removable disk media, 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 on a RAM disk, turning it into a regular DVD, but then the main point of the idea is lost. Yes, the vitality will be higher, but the general idea still looks doubtful. The carrier will not guarantee guaranteed reliability anyway, and the benefit is eaten up by the price and low availability of disks. In addition, a flash drive of the same volume is cheaper than a RAM disk, and buying space in the cloud or raising a file server for backups is even more profitable, easier and faster:). The sense of DVD-RAM is even less than that of floppy disks, which are sometimes needed for old machines, because they were once a mass standard. And DVD-RAM did not become such a standard. The technology is virtually unsuitable for use in the computer field. Disks are only in demand for exotic devices such as DVD recorders, where TV programs are recorded on them, and soon, probably, they won't be needed at all, because they have also been transferred to hard drives or flash memory for a long time.
PS I do not indicate the drive model used for the tests, because they were different drives on different machines — the drives behaved approximately the same everywhere.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/444666/
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