3 ms·
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, be
by tombert 7mo ago
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.
- ChrisGreenHeur 7mo ago[flagged]
- awesomeMilou 7mo agoWon't the epoxy run out at some point?
- mgrandl 7mo agoI guess the holes are so microscopic, even one cubic centimeter would last for the lifetime of the device.
- ChrisGreenHeur 7mo agoThat's the amazing part, when making the holes the epoxy melts and drips down into the collection bucket that the brush uses
- thombat 7mo 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.
- jagged-chisel 7mo agoI wouldn’t have expected gravity to be a problem at these scales. Wouldn’t surface tension override here? Maybe I’m totally off base …
- afandian 7mo agoThe 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...
- blue_pants 7mo agoEpoxy 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)?
- fhdkweig 7mo agoI think there was intended sarcasm/joke.
- 15155 7mo agoOr, you know, how the technology actually works: two different lasers and crystallization states.
- ChrisGreenHeur 7mo agoSure, dvds work by magic crystals.
- sethammons 7mo agoNext you're gonna tell me that applications run on text you can write by hand. Pffft. Ain't no way
- doublerabbit 7mo agoLLM'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.
- s_dev 7mo agoThis is a troll.
- bityard 7mo agoNo, it's a joke
- yibers 7mo agoThe DVD+RW actually used pencil and eraser technology instead. It was a surprisingly robust method.
- scientism 7mo agoThen 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...
- Dylan16807 7mo agoI guess the drives just cost too much and so zip won until flash drives took over.
- actionfromafar 7mo agoI 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.
- officeplant 7mo agoI 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.
- GiorgioG 7mo agoPeople who still remember Zip drives! In college I did tech support for Iomega. It was an interesting time ;)
- Tuna-Fish 7mo agodvd-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.
- lxgr 7mo agoThey 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.
- Fnoord 7mo agoMusic-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.
- lxgr 7mo agoNot 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.
- Fnoord 7mo agoHonestly, 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.
- lxgr 7mo agoSo your data only survived in a lossy format, because MiniDisc, but it did survive, also because MiniDisc? The quintessential MiniDisc experience :)
- 7mo ago