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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 37.2 ms ] threadI 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.
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.
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.
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!
I don't ever think I had one fail to write
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.
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.
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.