First post, by dr_st
- Rank
- l33t
Probably everyone was at one point excited about some technology, that we thought was cool and had potential, but due to various reasons it never took off / flopped.
Mine is DVD-RAM.
When I first got introduced to the world of optical media burning, the limitations of -R/RW media seemed to me very inconvenient to be used for backup. R is single-write, RW can be written multiple times, but basically you have to manually erase/reformat each time, or use the insanely slow, incompatible and unreliable "packet writing" method, which basically cheats to get you to feel as if you are doing random writes, while really it does the same sequential stuff behind your back (until it is out of space and you have to format).
So DVD-RAM looked really awesome. a 4.7GB disk that you can truly write to using random access, like a huge floppy or a small hard drive. It is supported almost natively by any modern OS (XP requires you to install a driver, Vista+ have support built in), works seamlessly, and is said to survive many more rewrite cycles than RW media. The "official" numbers are 100,000 cycles (versus 1,000 on RW), and while I am sure they are bogus, I've had some RW media become unreliable after fewer than 10 rewrites, so as long as DVD-RAM was more durable than that (and it is), I thought I was set.
But the format never really took off. First, I guess that the media is relatively complex to manufacture. There were only a handful of providers. It has always been very rare on store shelves. As a result it was significantly more expensive (in some cases 10 times as much as similar capacity RW media). Prices did go down eventually, and online you can find the media fairly cheap, but then you hit the other problem:
It's slow. Dreadfully slow. The standard supports 12x and 16x media, but I have never seen anything higher than 5x in the mass market, and a lot was even slower than that. Not to mention that DVD-RAM has built-in forced verification after every write, which is a nice thing for reliability, but means that the actual speed is half the formal speed. Given the inherent penalty when writing small files, it can literally take more than an hour to fill a single disk. It it much more efficient to use cheap expendable 16x -R media, and then throw it in the trash and burn a new one each time you need to modify a backup archive. In many cases cheaper too, and you are less likely to hit compatibility issues (DVD-RAM media is rarely read by anything other than PC optical drives and professional racks, and not even by all of them).
And, of course, today, with the age of fast, cheap, huge-capacity random access rewritable flash/magnetic media, all optical disks are all but obsolete, and DVD-RAM just follows the pack.
But I still have a warm place for it in my heart, and I still have about 20 disks which I use as another layer of backup (in addition to hard drives in various locations), mostly for personal archives that change rarely and infrequently. But at this point it is more a fetish than useful practice.
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