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.
They 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.
Music-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.
Not 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.
Honestly, 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.
That's the thing. It wasn't me. Someone in the scene received it from original artist, and he put it on minidisc, this was end 90s. Those who appreciate the genre, love these hidden gems, but it is only available as lossy due to minidisc (and MP3). Back then, FLAC did not yet exist, but CD did. Regarding MP3, codecs (including LAME) improved a lot over the years. The overal quality of the LAME presets, nowadays (and this has been tge way for more tgan a decade), is good enough compared to lossless, something double blind tests confirm.
In this case, I believe you are right: I don't think the data would've survived without minidisc. But in other circumstances where the user did not know minidisc is lossy?
In the end, a lot of these hidden gems have been (re)released because lost tapes (and, I suppose, HDDs) were found which is neat.
dvd-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.
I 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.
I 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.
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)?
Then 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...
It 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.
The 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...
LLM'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.
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.