- 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.
- I thought two-three times. Maybe a dozen. I always treated all kinds of writeable CD/DVDs as if they were one-write and done.
To be honest, it hurts every time I write to an SSD drive — which is all of the time these days.
- 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.
- I just checked using $ sudo smartctl -a /dev/nvme0n1
That's after about 2 years of use. I think SSDs can take quite the beating nowadays.Percentage Used: 2% Data Units Read: 7,173,143 [3.67 TB] Data Units Written: 22,666,414 [11.6 TB]- 7 years of use :D
Percentage Used: 3% Data Units Read: 77,182,320 [39.5 TB] Data Units Written: 83,995,559 [43.0 TB] - Percentage Used: 0% Data Units Read: 15,235,390 [7.80 TB] Data Units Written: 33,573,616 [17.1 TB] Host Read Commands: 107,051,408 Host Write Commands: 496,391,879 Controller Busy Time: 455 Power Cycles: 938 Power On Hours: 13,189
Not bad ;)
- You write 3x more than you read? Seems like a strange access pattern. Maybe something is going haywire with logging?
- I wrote an article in a similar vein some years ago that might interest you too:
https://www.rlvision.com/blog/how-long-do-writable-cddvd-las...
- 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.
- Not sure I understand, are you saying that you were using MiniDiscs or other MO media and were experiencing bit rot?
Making ATRAC the exclusive and mandatory codec for MiniDisc Audio was another typical unfortunate Sony move but in my view doesn't discredit the strengths of the physical storage medium.
- Honestly, I wasn't being specific. I like a specific music genre, and within this music genre some unique content was saved to DAT and Minidisc. The DATs were lost, and so the only available medium has been based on Minidisc.
- So your data only survived in a lossy format, because MiniDisc, but it did survive, also because MiniDisc? The quintessential MiniDisc experience :)
- 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 guess the drives just cost too much and so zip won until flash drives took over.
- People who still remember Zip drives! In college I did tech support for Iomega. It was an interesting time ;)
- 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.
- I miss my first 128mb usb drive. Cost nearly $40 and survived a dozen wash cycles accidently left in my pocket all the time. Now days I've got 64gb drives that seem to shit the bed after a few rounds as a Live-USB linux environment. At least they only cost $15 or less.
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- Epoxy and brushes?
Doesn't it use a special metal layer, and the laser high-heats the spots to make them amorphous (to write) and then low-heats them to crystallize (to erase)?
- I think there was intended sarcasm/joke.
- The DVD+RW actually used pencil and eraser technology instead. It was a surprisingly robust method.
- Then came DVD±RW which used the magic pen technology. Each time you write, it changed both the color of the disc and the data. Surprisingly enough if you did it long enough it ended in color/data corruption...
- Won't the epoxy run out at some point?
- That's the amazing part, when making the holes the epoxy melts and drips down into the collection bucket that the brush uses
- It comes years too late, but I finally understand the reliability problems I had with a DVD drive mounted on its side. If only I'd had your insight then, I could have taken the PC to a playground and burnt disks on the carousel.
- I wouldn’t have expected gravity to be a problem at these scales. Wouldn’t surface tension override here? Maybe I’m totally off base …
- The original solution involved a very thick disc which could then leveled and re-pitted. The problem was that the change in mass over time made it hard to calibrate the acceleration.
It also put a high radial load on the spindle whilst mounted sideways which led to run-out.
And flooding the area with radon (a heavy gas) helped the disc to float a bit, but had unexpected consequences...
- I guess the holes are so microscopic, even one cubic centimeter would last for the lifetime of the device.
- Or, you know, how the technology actually works: two different lasers and crystallization states.
- Sure, dvds work by magic crystals.
- Next you're gonna tell me that applications run on text you can write by hand. Pffft. Ain't no way
- LLM's are actually little elves from the DMT dimension. They got captured and compressed in to silicon cells that now been enslaved by the evil. If you ask a LLM they will tell you it's true.
- >Windows Updates
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!
- For a nuclear option, delete C:\windows\system32\wua* or move these files somewhere else.
- The nuclear option is linux
- I'm pretty sure I read that at some point they started still allowing updates on metered connections, just slower or more critical or something.
- 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.
- If you don't want feature updates, go Windows 11 IoT Enterprise LTSC. It's a comparative breath of fresh air and what Windows should have been all along. No ads, no new unwanted bloat shoved down your throat, no mandatory TPM, and pretty much the longest security patch commitment of anything out of Microsoft. It works great as a daily driver.
- You could also use an OS that doesn't tend to have dodgy updates that brick your system, such as most Linux distro. Nor force you to update if you don't want to.
Funny how a large company like Microsoft can't figure out QA, but volunteer Linux distros with much less resources can.
(A lot of Windows specific software works in wine these days, Valve's investment into improving it for games have helped for applications too. Not everything, and if you are stuck with such software, yeah that sucks.)
- > if you are stuck with such software
kvm-qemu, windows image, block network access to the windows update servers, problem solved?
- I never managed to get Fusion 360 running reasonably on Linux, in the end I switched CAD software. It really needs some sort of reasonable OpenGL support (or maybe DirectX, I forget which it was). And it doesn't work under wine, it did at some point but then it stopped. Cloud connected software, so you can't just run an old version.
Maybe if you had a second GPU and forwarded it to the VM? Not willing to spend that extra money, and it would only work on my desktop, not my laptop.
- > You could also use an OS that doesn't tend to have dodgy updates that brick your system, such as most Linux distro.
I haven't done it recently but back when I was learning Linux, I definitely bricked my fair share of installations updating and installing things.
It was probably fixable to a more experienced person but it wasn't to me.
Linux is a lot of things but brick-proof for novice users isn't one of them.
- It has gotten a lot better from what I can tell, though that is just based on what I see others struggle with (or not struggle with as may be the case).
I can't judge this directly (I'm in way too deep, running Arch etc), I first started using Linux seriously in 2004, stopped using Windows except for gaming by 2006, and touched it less and less over the years. I have not used Windows 11 at all.
- I always wanted to like DVD-RW and CD-RW. But I just couldn't.
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.
- 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.
- DVD±RW is old stuff, I want proper phase-change persistent memory. Bring back Intel Optane and hook it up to a modern, high-performance PCIe bus.
- The same site has an article on that: https://goughlui.com/2024/07/28/tech-flashback-intel-optane-...
Retention issues are a bit worrying.
- This is awesome, thanks.
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?
- My kingdom for a MicroSD card with Optane inside.
- There may be hope for something like that happening, conceptually at least. Underlying technology is different, though:
https://www.heise.de/en/news/Memory-chip-company-FMC-keeps-w...
- 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.
- I wish there were dual layer RW discs. Afaik some were made but they never hit the consumer market in the end
- What a great analysis! 20 years ago, this would have saved me a lot of headache/anxiety and a moderate amount of pocket money :)
- IIRC, the issue was never how often the DVD-R/W could be rewritten.
The issue was the fact that everybody assumed that the DVD-R/W discs had roughly the same lifetime as actual DVDs and that turned out to be woefully incorrect.
- The quality differences between DVD-RW brands and batches were huge, with some discs barely surviving ten rewrites while others managed many more. Exposure to heat or sunlight kills them quickly, even though they were not marketed as disposable. For real archival needs, options like M-DISC, tape, or cheap SSDs are more reliable than rewritable DVDs.
- People did? I thought that was common knowledge, as it also was for CDs. Not only that, compatibility with players were much worse.
Though there were times were RW discs cost as much as normal ones, and some friends of mine defaulted to buying RW even for stuff that was write once. I didn't get that, but for them the ability to, maybe, reuse the disc outweighed any reliability issues.
- With USB drives today being large and popular, what are the main uses of DVD-R's and DVD-RW's, in your experience?
- Thank you. Now I can rest easy knowing that my 500 stack of unused DVDRWs sitting in my cupboard that I got for so cheap at Fry's is going to last me the rest of my life.
- I didn’t know there was a rewritable dvd format. My dad had a bunch of dvds, I used to love sneaking one off to play on my computer when I was a kid, since he stopped noticing when he got into bluray
- DVD±RW was super useful for passing around files in a period where flash drives were expensive. My high school photo journalism club used them a lot to pass around photos and documents, a couple days later they'd get ingested into the PC in the club room, erased, and put back on the pile for you to bring one home.
I don't ever think I had one fail to write
- There was actually only a short period of time when only write-once DVDs existed. By 2005 just about any computer DVD drive you could buy supported all combinations of {CD,DVD}±{R,RW} that existed. Blank RW disks were, of course, more expensive than R's, though.
- Yes, they were present and not much expensive than standard ones. However, the issue was that they encountered problems/data loss after few rewrites.
- Except that according TFA they can actually last thousands of rewrite cycles.
- Indeed, I posted it because my experience was different, perhaps due to my DVD writer or my settings. After 10- 15 rewrites, I almost always encountered issues
- Very timely article! :)
- Really astounding dedication! And to be honest, I'm really surprised that DC Erase actually revived discs. Maybe the next step is to pick one disc, and keep using DC Erase, and see when it absolutely and totally fails?
When I was a kid I read that you can format DVD-RW in a way that makes Windows see it as a normal filesystem. The next step was "can you install a video game onto a disc?" and the answer was "nope, you cannot, at least not Lego Star Wars".
Also, there was a strange phenomenon that I'd love to see someone explain. I burned The Sims 2 onto CDs. The game worked. After some time the disc would fail at a file called voice1.package. I burned a second disc, which would again last some time, and then fail at the same exact file. I went through many discs, each one displaying the same behavior.
- Looks like a stale article from 2006.
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232 points by giuliomagnifico 4 days ago | 79 comments