[Ham-Computers] RE: DVD Media Question

[WA5CAB at cs.com]

Obviously I have no experience with DVD's or I wouldn't have started the 
threads.  But I have 5-1/2 years experience with CD's.  My reasons for not using 
CD-RW's are as follows:

Cost:  2.5X to 3X over CD-R's
Write speed:  Although you have to have the drive to support it, current 
ratio is 4+ to 1.
Reliability:  In 5-1/2 years, I've had five different drives here, and had 
trouble with CD-RW's with all of them.

The thing that I finally learned about the -RW's (long after I quit using 
them) was that although vendors claim 1000 re-write cycles, which sounds like a 
lot, especially when in my case most use is backup of .TIF files that once 
finished I seldom go back and revise.  Just add more files to the CD.  In a 
previously unused area.  You're still on write/rewrite cycle one.  Unfortunately, 
what the vendors don't tell you is that the area that corresponds to the FAT on 
a generic hard drive gets re-written far more frequently.  It isn't clear how 
often as how the directory area is organized isn't readily available (and I 
haven't spent any time looking for it).

Anyway, when I started off with CD's, having at the time an inherent distaste 
for something that got smaller if I re-used it, I was going to do all my 
backups on CD-RW's, even though at that time they were quite expensive.  After a 
few months, I realized that I had had to discard most of the first several 
batches that I had bought, not because they failed a write but because they failed 
a read or wouldn't even mount.  Not a warm-fuzzy when your only backup copies 
of thousands of hours of work have to be rebuilt from the hard drives that 
were presumed to be less reliable.  And then I almost lost our last seven years 
of FIT returns.  Finally got the drive in one of our three machines to mount 
the disk, and was able to recover them.  That was it for CD-RW's for me.

In a message dated 1/20/2005 9:16:40 PM Central Standard Time, 
ka4inm at tampabay.rr.com writes: 
> Hsu, Aaron (NBC Universal) wrote:
> 
> >Any "RW" format has many caveats and I generally avoid them.  It's not 
> worth
> >the hassle if something goes "wrong" and I have to use data recovery tools
> >to recover the data on the disc.  Less likely to occur with write-once 
> DVD's
> >as the media is inheirently more stable (as well as the recording format).
> 
>    I think you are referring to the UDF format, but many people use DVD-RW's 
> and 
> CD-RW's just like a DVD-R or a CD-R.  If it doesn't compare favorably, we 
> erase 
> it and write it again, possibly at a slower speed.  Why avoid *-RW's?
> 

Robert Downs - Houston
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