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, but I sure used the heck out of my DVD writer when I had it. I had no idea these discs could go hundreds of writes before failure, I always got paranoid about reliability and probably never went above 20 writes on a disc.
Edit: at the end of the post the author says, "that’s about 4020 hours across two drives, 5248 burns and both drives are still seemingly operating just fine." What a colossal amount of time.
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.
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.
From my personal experience, the article and the comments I read here they seriously undersold the reliability of rewriting. For any other RW medium (audio or video cassettes, even floppies) I remember ad campaigns by Sony, TDK, Philips, … on tv. But not for these.
I feel in general the industry was more conservative making these kind of estimates than it is today. I assume they also benefited from years of CD-RW field experience honing the tech.
Ye, having experienced the "joys" of rewriteable CDs, I completely skipped the DVD RWs, expecting more of the same. Guess it wasn't, but then again, thumb drives became a thing.
DVD-RWs always seemed like complete magic to me. I had no idea how they worked, or why they worked. I made and wiped DVD-RWs as a teenager dozens of times, because my dad got annoyed that I kept using up all his DVD-R's, so I bought like three DVD-RWs and used them for all my experiments.
I don't think I got anywhere near the limits for any of them, as I don't remember getting any faults from them, but they were always cool to me.
I was also one of the happy few who had a DVD-RAM drive for my desktop as a teenager; I never really understood why DVD-RAM never caught on, because it seemed to work fine for me, and it was kind of nice not having to wipe the disk to erase stuff.
They definitely are mysterious, but to me, magneto-optical media (such as MiniDiscs) take the cake.
Written magnetically (while heated by a laser), read optically (by a much weaker laser), and somehow all of that fit into a pocketable player powered for 10+ hours by a single AA battery!?
Unlike rewritable optical media, opto-magnetic storage also seems to have effectively unlimited rewrite cycles. It's a real shame they never became a popular data storage option, mainly due to Sony's paranoia stemming from also owning a huge music and film division.
Music-wise, lossy compression takes place via a proprietary codec (ATRAC). It isn't viable for data storage (neither was CDR(W)). Trust me, I had data loss due to all of these. Just use LTO with some parity data.
dvd-ram drives and media were always premium products, with the drives at least ~4x more expensive than the -r drives of the time, and the media was much worse than that.
When -r disks bought in bulk cost ~20c each, $10 disks are a hard sell.
I saw zip adoption before CD-RW, flash drives much later. But maybe it depended on how much data you needed transferred. Early flash drives were much smaller than CD/DVD.
If you have a Pro edition license most things Windows does are a registry key away. The entire policy branch of the registry is designed to have configuration pushed down from the network like when and how to update, but you can also set all of those keys manually.
(Also, no hacking is necessary to set up a Windows Pro install with a local account, just tell it you're going to domain join it.)
The local account tip is a good one. I used it when setting up Windows 11 Pro on my desktop PC.
Regarding updates: you might not even need to think about registry keys! I found these Windows 10 group policy settings to work well for many years: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18157968 - and I'm still using them with Windows 11, near enough, though it seems you now need to go to "Windows Update\Manage end user experience" to find the Configure Automatic Updates setting I mention.
(I've also switched to using option 2 (Notify for download and auto install) rather than 3 (Auto download and notify for install), on the basis that it sounds safer, and I've had no problems from doing that. Not to say that I actually remember having any problems from letting Windows download the updates ahead of time! - but I'm comfortable living dangerously.)
One hint for the wary: Don't delay feature updates for the maximum allowed in the group policy editor. I couldn't figure out why I was getting forced reboots for updates despite other policies requiring it to ask permission. Turns out that if the update hits the group policy maximum, it forces an update immediately, other policies be damned.
So set it to the max - 14 days if you want some time to apply updates at your leisure, and you are wary of non-critical updates.
I used to work for a vendor who wrote the drivers for iTunes CD burning, I actually built a in house tool that could take multiple machines with 8 drives each and test our driver by burning to CD-R, DVD-R, DVD-RW, etc... and read the data back to ensure no regressions in our drivers.
Reason for testing so many drives is that when it comes to the real world, a lot of drive manufacturers cut corners and didn't follow standards, so we had a growing list of "work arounds" that we would validate. Every manufacturer would send us their drives to validate, we had a huge closet with shelves floor to ceiling of different drives.
Was a cool internship out of high school an forever thankful that I got it. Even if it's my most boomer skillset.
Couple of main things that post are 100% correct, the brand of media does matter. We actually had specific media we would recommend to the DOD for maximum stability. Second of all faster media always performs worse for archival purposes, and burning faster will result in more errors as well.
For testing we had a specific media for each type we found could be used for 25x tests reliably, but I don't remember the brands/type. We would basically load them once a year since we did a full verification every few weeks.
My understanding is Optane is still unbeaten today when it comes to latency. Has anyone examined its use as a workstation OS volume compared to leading SSD's?
Why did the author have to do all this hacking around with screenshots? Back in the day, you could query any window for its title/text/buttons and send events to the buttons directly. Is this not the case in Windows any more?
Apart from win32 itself, most frameworks (everything from Java Swing to Electron) just use the win32 API to draw pixels to the screen and don't integrate with the window hierarchy.
Would be interested to know if automating rewrites makes the disc run hotter which affects the disc lifetime physically as opposed to writing it and then removing it which cools it off (but may cause physical wear and tear from handling it). Does heat play a role in degradation or whether it’s the opposite and helps it in some way.
Readit News
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, but I sure used the heck out of my DVD writer when I had it. I had no idea these discs could go hundreds of writes before failure, I always got paranoid about reliability and probably never went above 20 writes on a disc.
Edit: at the end of the post the author says, "that’s about 4020 hours across two drives, 5248 burns and both drives are still seemingly operating just fine." What a colossal amount of time.
To be honest, it hurts every time I write to an SSD drive — which is all of the time these days.
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.
https://www.rlvision.com/blog/how-long-do-writable-cddvd-las...
I don't think I got anywhere near the limits for any of them, as I don't remember getting any faults from them, but they were always cool to me.
I was also one of the happy few who had a DVD-RAM drive for my desktop as a teenager; I never really understood why DVD-RAM never caught on, because it seemed to work fine for me, and it was kind of nice not having to wipe the disk to erase stuff.
Written magnetically (while heated by a laser), read optically (by a much weaker laser), and somehow all of that fit into a pocketable player powered for 10+ hours by a single AA battery!?
Unlike rewritable optical media, opto-magnetic storage also seems to have effectively unlimited rewrite cycles. It's a real shame they never became a popular data storage option, mainly due to Sony's paranoia stemming from also owning a huge music and film division.
When -r disks bought in bulk cost ~20c each, $10 disks are a hard sell.
Dead Comment
If you want to stop windows updates, make your internet connection a metered connection. Updates will only be allowed on-demand.
The more you know!
(Also, no hacking is necessary to set up a Windows Pro install with a local account, just tell it you're going to domain join it.)
Regarding updates: you might not even need to think about registry keys! I found these Windows 10 group policy settings to work well for many years: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18157968 - and I'm still using them with Windows 11, near enough, though it seems you now need to go to "Windows Update\Manage end user experience" to find the Configure Automatic Updates setting I mention.
(I've also switched to using option 2 (Notify for download and auto install) rather than 3 (Auto download and notify for install), on the basis that it sounds safer, and I've had no problems from doing that. Not to say that I actually remember having any problems from letting Windows download the updates ahead of time! - but I'm comfortable living dangerously.)
So set it to the max - 14 days if you want some time to apply updates at your leisure, and you are wary of non-critical updates.
Reason for testing so many drives is that when it comes to the real world, a lot of drive manufacturers cut corners and didn't follow standards, so we had a growing list of "work arounds" that we would validate. Every manufacturer would send us their drives to validate, we had a huge closet with shelves floor to ceiling of different drives.
Was a cool internship out of high school an forever thankful that I got it. Even if it's my most boomer skillset.
Couple of main things that post are 100% correct, the brand of media does matter. We actually had specific media we would recommend to the DOD for maximum stability. Second of all faster media always performs worse for archival purposes, and burning faster will result in more errors as well.
For testing we had a specific media for each type we found could be used for 25x tests reliably, but I don't remember the brands/type. We would basically load them once a year since we did a full verification every few weeks.
Retention issues are a bit worrying.
My understanding is Optane is still unbeaten today when it comes to latency. Has anyone examined its use as a workstation OS volume compared to leading SSD's?
https://www.heise.de/en/news/Memory-chip-company-FMC-keeps-w...
https://www.ferroelectric-memory.com/technology/
Cost. A couple dollars per disc, versus a couple pennies per disc for the one-time use.
Easily scratched.
They were slow. You could use a Syquest or Iomega 1GB drive, boot off it, etc. Basically as fast as a hard drive was.
They were compatible until they weren't. Plenty of issues trying to read those things on other computers.