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Tested: How Many Times Can a DVD±RW Be Rewritten? Methodology and Results
- inquirerGeneral 8mo ago[dead]
- parsimo2010 8mo agoI 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.
- rlv-dan 8mo agoI 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-last-400-discs-put-to-the-test/ https://www.rlvision.com/blog/how-long-do-writable-cddvd-las...
- parsimo2010 8mo agoThanks, 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.
- krige 8mo agoYe, 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.
- CamelCaseCondo 8mo agoFrom 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.
- rkagerer 8mo agoI 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.
- avadodin 8mo agoI 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.
- Fnoord 8mo agoFor 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.
- sandos 8mo agoAs overseeing backing up, from various optical media to disk, just don't use the optical stuff! This was a huge international conglomerate, doing CD backups for decades. Now it turns out these precious backups only worked 96-98% of the time. Terrible stuff.
- wolvoleo 8mo agoActually 96-98% is not great but not terrible if you're employing some kind of parity scheme across multiple discs. It just means 1 in 20 (or 1 in 10 to be safe) extra discs in the mix.
- wolvoleo 8mo agoFibre channel HBAs really cost peanuts. Because there's tons on the second hand market and the only ones who want them are enterprises who don't buy second hand shit without a support contract (they usually dump them when the support is up, that's why there's so many working ones on the market) So I get €300 cards for €20, it's a joke. Really great though because they're really amazing for tying storage together and they can do point to point just fine. No switch needed. The one drawback is the convoluted software chain around it, I used to work with SANs but if you don't it might require a little investigation :) The client side is pretty easy, the target side is harder (this is the part that is normally covered by a SAN). But the biggest problem with LTO drives and home use for me is the terrible noise they make. If 3D printers sound like robots having sex, this is more like robots getting tortured.
- bsder 8mo agoIIRC, 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.
- tjoff 8mo agoPeople 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.
- hrmtst93837 8mo ago[flagged]
- tombert 8mo agoDVD-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.
- ChrisGreenHeur 8mo ago[flagged]
- awesomeMilou 8mo agoWon't the epoxy run out at some point?
- mgrandl 8mo agoI guess the holes are so microscopic, even one cubic centimeter would last for the lifetime of the device.
- ChrisGreenHeur 8mo agoThat's the amazing part, when making the holes the epoxy melts and drips down into the collection bucket that the brush uses
- thombat 8mo agoIt 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.
- grepfru_it 8mo ago>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!
- ocdtrekkie 8mo agoIf 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.)
- avidiax 8mo agoOne 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.
- VorpalWay 8mo agoYou 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.)
- fc417fc802 8mo ago> if you are stuck with such software kvm-qemu, windows image, block network access to the windows update servers, problem solved?
- karlgkk 8mo agoI 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
- giuliomagnifico 8mo agoYes, they were present and not much expensive than standard ones. However, the issue was that they encountered problems/data loss after few rewrites.
- Sharlin 8mo agoExcept that according TFA they can actually last thousands of rewrite cycles.
- giuliomagnifico 8mo agoIndeed, 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
- Sharlin 8mo agoThere 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.
- primis 8mo agoDVD±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
- baCist 8mo agoVery timely article! :)
- zozbot234 8mo agoDVD±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.
- userbinator 8mo agoThe same site has an article on that: https://goughlui.com/2024/07/28/tech-flashback-intel-optane-3d-xpoint-memory/ https://goughlui.com/2024/07/28/tech-flashback-intel-optane-... Retention issues are a bit worrying.
- rkagerer 8mo agoThis 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?
- myself248 8mo agoMy kingdom for a MicroSD card with Optane inside.
- LargoLasskhyfv 8mo agoThere 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-working-on-semiconductor-plant-near-Magdeburg-11151026.html https://www.heise.de/en/news/Memory-chip-company-FMC-keeps-w... https://www.ferroelectric-memory.com/technology/ https://www.ferroelectric-memory.com/technology/
- haunter 8mo agoI wish there were dual layer RW discs. Afaik some were made but they never hit the consumer market in the end
- anal_reactor 8mo agoReally 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.
- dimk95 8mo ago[dead]
- htor 8mo agoI think what we are all really questioning about is: how many times can it be rewritten in Rust?
- Sharlin 8mo agoNo, this is optical media, rewriting in rust only pertains to magnetic storage.
- compounding_it 8mo agoWould 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.
- stavros 8mo agoWhy 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?
- gzread 8mo agoApart 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.
- bearjaws 8mo agoI 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.
- cynicalsecurity 8mo agoLooks like a stale article from 2006.
- lxgr 8mo agoWhat a great analysis! 20 years ago, this would have saved me a lot of headache/anxiety and a moderate amount of pocket money :)
- xbar 8mo agoThank 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.
- bluedino 8mo agoI 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.
- einpoklum 8mo agoWith USB drives today being large and popular, what are the main uses of DVD-R's and DVD-RW's, in your experience?