[Ham-Computers] RE: DVD Media Question

[Duane B. Fischer, W8DBF]

Now truthfully, how much of what you save do you ever really use? Most of us
never go back and use a tenth of what we save. Look around at all of those 3.5
inch diskettes, zip disks, CDS and so forth. Chaces are that you do not even
remember what is on most of them, right? Wasted space, for the vast majority of
it.	
	
I have been in audio for forty years, computers for twenty-four. As far as I am
concerned, the CDRW is a total waste of money. I do not care if it is in a
computer or in a high end stand alone piece of audio gear. Nothing but problems
and uncertainity, who needs that? Not I.	
	
Look at those CDS you burned. How many are using the actual storage space and
how many have just a little on them? yep. The more we can store, the more we
will waste.

----------
From: WA5CAB at cs.com
To: ka4inm at tampabay.rr.com; ham-computers at mailman.qth.net
Subject: Re: [Ham-Computers] RE:  DVD Media Question
Date: Friday, January 21, 2005 12:10 AM

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
<http://www.wa5cab.com> (Web Store)
<wa5cab at cs.com> (Primary email)
<wa5cab at houston.rr.com> (Backup email)
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