4 ms·

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 6

by parsimo2010 7mo ago

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.

rlv-dan 7mo ago
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-last-400-discs-put-to-the-test/ https://www.rlvision.com/blog/how-long-do-writable-cddvd-las...
- parsimo2010 7mo ago
  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.
krige 7mo ago
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.
CamelCaseCondo 7mo ago
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.
- rkagerer 7mo ago
  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.
avadodin 7mo ago
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.
- Fnoord 7mo ago
  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.
  - sandos 7mo ago
    As 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 7mo ago
      Actually 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 7mo ago
    Fibre 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.

rlv-dan 7mo ago

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-last-400-discs-put-to-the-test/ https://www.rlvision.com/blog/how-long-do-writable-cddvd-las...

parsimo2010 7mo ago
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.

krige 7mo ago

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.

CamelCaseCondo 7mo ago

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.

rkagerer 7mo ago
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.

avadodin 7mo ago

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.

Fnoord 7mo ago
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.
- sandos 7mo ago
  As 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 7mo ago
    Actually 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 7mo ago
  Fibre 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.