While CDs were still fighting for market share against cassettes, and gaming consoles were just starting to switch over to CD from cartridge storage, optical media companies were already thinking ahead. Only two years after the introduction of the original PlayStation, the DVD Forum had introduced the DVD-RAM standard: 2.58 GB per side of a disc in a protective caddy. The killer feature? Essentially unlimited re-writeability. In a DVD drive that supports DVD-RAM, they act more like removable hard drive platters. You can even see hard sectors etched into the media at the time of manufacture, giving DVD-RAM its very recognizable pattern.
At the time, floppy drives were still popular, and CD-ROM drives were increasingly available pre-installed in new computers. Having what amounted to a hard drive platter with a total of 5 GB per disc should have been a killer feature for consumers. Magneto-optical drives were still very expensive, and by 1998 were only 1.3 GB in size. DVD-RAM had the same verify-after-write data integrity feature that magneto-optical drives were known for, but with larger capacity, and after the introduction of 4.7 GB size discs, no caddy was required.
So why didn’t DVD-RAM completely take over removable storage? The gigabyte-size MO drives in 2002 sold for about $400 in 2001 (roughly $721 today), whereas the first 4.7 GB DVD-RAM drives sold in 1998 for $500-$800, with blank discs costing $30 for single-sided and $45 for double-sided, which would have been 9.4 GB total per disc. Around the same time, MO discs with 1.3 GB capacity were often around $20-$25, though they varied widely. So we can see the up-front cost for a DVD-RAM drive was higher, with the media cost per megabyte lower.
Another benefit of DVD-RAM over MO drives was the ability to do hard-drive-like fast random seeks and support various filesystems, allowing non-contiguous data. MO drives were typically quite a bit slower, though they had a decent continuous write speed if writing large blocks of data contiguously. Around this same time, devices like the LS-120 and ZIP drive were trying to replace floppy drives, but their relatively small media sizes of 120 MB / 240 MB and 100 MB / 250 MB couldn’t do the same things DVD could do. Despite this, the Iomega ZIP in particular did have some breakthrough success. This was mostly because of the relatively low drive cost, and the price per 100 MB ZIP disk being $10-$15 on average. These were more expensive per MB than DVD-RAM or MO, but with lower overall consumer investment. So it really seems like the up-front drive costs for DVD-RAM kept them from becoming ubiquitous, though reviews at the time showed that those who bought and used the drives loved them and felt they were an economical way to store and transfer data.
DVD-RAM, What’s It Good For?
One of the killer apps for DVD-RAM ended up being Personal Video Recorders, or PVRs. The TiVo introduced consumers to the idea of easy, high-quality timeshifting without having to faff about with the timer feature on their VCRs. A DVD-RAM-based PVR could easily record many shows in high quality, play them back instantly, and be used an essentially unlimited number of times. With the purchase of 3-4 DVD-RAM discs, you could easily record and store your favourite TV shows and later transfer them to another medium for long-term storage. Similarly, DVD-RAM drives in handheld camcorders made a lot of sense, but for various reasons, DVD-RW and some tape formats continued to dominate in that field.
For archival and backup purposes, CD-R, DVD-R and even LTO tape drives were still much more popular. Despite write-once optical media being single-use, the much lower media cost and the rapidly falling price of CD and then DVD burners meant they were much more popular. Many consumers didn’t even realize that their newly purchased DVD burner could almost certainly also support DVD-RAM discs. And for audio and video, write-once media made more sense for the vast majority of end users. Though CD-RW and DVD-RW weren’t quite as popular as the write-once media, they remained more popular than DVD-RAM despite lacking the extreme write endurance of DVD-RAM. It’s hard to say definitively why this is the case, though consumer confusion about all the different blank media formats likely played a part. People were already confused enough about the difference between DVD-R and DVD+R!
Of course, we can’t talk about DVD-RAM’s downfall without mentioning USB flash drives. First introduced commercially around 1999 in sizes of 8 MB, by 2002 drives in the 1 GB – 2 GB capacity were available. These were much smaller and lighter than optical media and had very fast read/write speeds (comparatively) — especially with USB 2.0 becoming popular. Their cost and ubiquity were the death knell not only for DVD-RAM as a portable storage format, but also floppies, magneto-optical, ZIP drives, and essentially everything except for CD-R and DVD-R for audio and movie burning, respectively. While USB drives didn’t have the write endurance of DVD-RAM drives, for most users this wasn’t a problem — they were just transferring office documents, pictures, and other files back and forth between computers. If one started to wear out, another could be cheaply purchased.
So in 2024, is there any use for DVD-RAM left? I recently purchased a pack of 6 brand-new, Japanese-made Panasonic DVD-RAM discs to test out with my USB DVD burner. Essentially all DVD drives still support DVD-RAM, though as Technology Connections discovered in his rundown on the format, the drive firmware support for DVD-RAM seems to be slapdash and lacking in many ways. Write speeds are nowhere near what they should be. On my Arch Linux laptop, I couldn’t believe how slow copy speeds were. iostat showed utilization of less than 1% of the available bandwidth, and with the disc constantly speeding up and spinning down, I was seeing speeds way under 50 kB/s most of the time. Considering DVD-RAM discs support up to 3x (4140 kB/s), something was clearly wrong.
I connected the drive to my Windows 10 virtual machine and saw mostly similar speeds, except when writing an ISO to the drive. Because this seems to be a firmware issue, the usefulness of DVD-RAM for doing backups of important files depends entirely on the drive you happen to own. My idea was to back up all my code, schematic, and PCB design files as they are the most valuable files on my laptop. If I can find a decent drive, I might still follow through — but with 128GB USB drives being less than the cost of the 6 DVD-RAM discs I bought, I can’t say it’s economical, more just for the nerd cred.
Spin up and down is caused by low quality discs. Set the drive to a lower speed. That will improve write quality and data readability during verification.
Another suggestion is not to use Linux unless you do IOMMU / PCI pass-through for the USB controller to your virtual Windows – but then your mouse probably won’t work. You’d better install a WinXP SP3 on bare metal for maximum compatibility with such old tech.
Using a lower speed is a good recommendation, but passing though devices to the VM isn’t going to help performance in this case, only reliability and this was just a test.
I had similar issues with some old DVD-Ram I found in one of my many boxes. I tried different systems. the speed did not like to increase. Then I used an old Laptop with XP still on itand everything went fine.
I’m really interested to read about Linux DVD-RAM support. I thought there wasn’t any.
Also interested in CD/DVD-RW packet writing and Mount Rainier, btw.
Haeh? I think I started to use DVD-Ram over Linux 20year ago.
Connect it, format it with youre favorite filesystem and mount it. Was never a problem.
That was one of the things that made me prefer Linux.
I’m not sure I ever had a DVD-RAM disk. But I had lots of CDRWs and DVDRWs.
I don’t think you could do regular filesystems on RWs right? But it after building iso-9660 write support into the kernel (strangely no distro seemed to include that by default) That was pretty much how it worked. Combine that with SuperMount… then you could just stick the disk in the drive and use it just like a really big floppy.
On Windows OTOH you had to run some usermode application that came with the drive to copy files back and forth. Or.. you had to close the session, then you could read it like a CD but it was read-only. That was so cheesy!
Noice!
Mine are working under Linux since 2005-6. Even tried making ext2/3/4 on them (don’t recommend), it can be done and works, with caveats. Reliable and slow, like floppies in early 1990s, before price and quality plummeted.
Not all DVD RAM discs came in a caddy, as per article photos.
I have many of the Panasonic discs pictured myself, I purchased one of the ‘set top box’ style DVR devices for backing up home videos and as a DVR. I still occasionally use it for VHS backup.
Do have to ask just how durable those USB drives will be though and how long the data will last, my understanding is DVD-RAM has among the longest expected shelf life of all the optical media, and even the worst optical media tends to trash that USB drive there too! I’d not have picked DVD-RAM as I didn’t do the research to know that in theory the disk should be supported, but still…
So when it comes to a real backup situation there are good reasons not to use USB, where I struggle to see a point to using anything but the cheap SD/USB storage is the sneaker net type concepts where your network is never fast/reliable/available enough – cheap, reasonably fast, huge volume of data stored so good even for large video? files etc.
Storage makes a big difference. I’ve seen cheap CD-R’s that were left in the sun ‘bleach’ within a few years.
If you’re storing important data on optical discs, keep them out of the sun!
Yes very true, I was assuming there you put your important backup somewhere sensible for it.
There is lots of ways to harm any of your backups no matter the media its on, and if your backup has to exist in hostile environments for some reason the Flash storage may be the right option..
interesting, can you re-use them after “bleaching”, like we did with UV-EEPROMS back in the day?
Reason for asking, my old dad “erased” some DVD-R recordings, so the discs were then blank. But unusable!
Good question to ask. The general concensus seems to be that DVD-RAM should be good for about 30 years. That’s not a match for HTL Blu-ray or M-Disc, but way better than flash of any kind. In fact, if you want a reliable ten years of flash life, you need SLC (single bit per cell) flash, which is kind of a speciality item today. You can find SLC drives on DigiKey, and you’ll pay for them. On Amazon, you’re probably getting TLC (3-bits per cell) or QLC (4-bits per cell) which are simply not useful for anything much beyond “sneakernet.” Not for long term storage.
The advantage of DVD-Ram is that they are all in caddy, so no problems with scratches and fingerprinting.
The disadvantage is that some of my 9.4GB Type 4 media fall in parts inside of the caddy because they are glued together from two disc! But not a huge problem because never have a backup only on one media type! I had 2.6GB MOs as second option. .-)
You are looking for the best drive?
cat /proc/scsi/scsi
Host: scsi4 Channel: 00 Id: 00 Lun: 00
Vendor: MATSHITA Model: DVD-RAM LF-M721 Rev: APQ2
Type: CD-ROM ANSI SCSI revision: 05
Something was wrong in this article. I can do any filesystem on DVD-Ram, but I can do the same with CD-R, DVD or Bluray. I can show you a CD with ext2 for example. Probably Microsofts operating systems are to stupid to show them, but who cares about them?
Olaf
matshita = matsushita = panasonic?
This was first DVD-Ram I bought:
https://www.zdnet.com/product/panasonic-lf-d521-dvd-burner-ii/
And I used it many years with Linux before I switched to LF-M721.
BTW: I am suprised about the ebay price about them now. Is there something special with them?
Olaf
sure is a trip to try to put myself in that late 90s / early 00s mindset. the pre-terabyte world. cost was so important. i always owned as much storage as i could possibly afford. storage was expensive and my bank account was empty. MO and DVD-RAM were both total non-starters for me because of cost.
I’ve never even heard of this and I know that I’ve never seen one of these discs in real life.
I only had few CD’s in my life, as I went from Cassette to MiniDisc to MP3. I did have a CD player but only for a week or so as I skated and it did not like me falling on it and those things were huge. I remember my first MP3 player had a huge storage space. 64MB! I don’t remember the model, I think it was green. When using low quality you could store about 40 songs on it. The only CD’s I really used were for the PlayStation (PSX) that I had for a few years but barely used.
I’ve had broadband since 2000 which resulted in only having had a few DVD’s for movies as they were upcoming around 1998 here, so I’ve only used them for movies for 2 years and barely used them as I had a bunch of VHS and DVD’s were expensive. The only exception is video games that came on physical discs, so up to about 2003 when Steam came out. I think the last one I bought physically was Half-Life 1. After that it was digital only for me.
I don’t think I’ve ever touched a blueray or hddvd.
DVD-RAM was great for transferring large amounts of data. It usually just worked. You didn’t have to worry about special packet writing software or managing multiple write sessions on a single disc.
There isn’t much use for DVD-RAM for the average person nowadays. I still use it to transfer files to and from older systems that aren’t connected to the network yet, and lack USB.
I’ve got a very weird problem with DVD RAMs… mine all became Write-Once.
For some reason, I’ve got like 3 or 4 entire boxes of NOS DVD RAMs. I found a DVD recorder in the e-waste that supports it and actually used it a little bit for timeshifting, but mainly for digitizing VHS (or other format) video tapes from friends (because the DVD recorder does much higher quality captures than any of my stack of TV digitizer cards).
Now the problem:
I used to be able to erase/overwrite DVD RAMs as I liked and pretty much used the same two or three discs over and over. That became unreliable first, then it would allow me to erase and overwrite it once, now I can write any DVD RAM exactly once. Once it’s written, that’s it. No erase. No delete. Not even in any other DVD-RAM capable drive/machine/whatever. I tried Linux, I tried WinXP with Nero 6, once my DVD recorder has written a DVD-RAM, it behaves as if it’s write protected. Even worse, if I try slow format, it becomes unusable. And, as I said, no other machine was able to undo that.
The Caddy-Style DVD-RAM reminds me of a giant Sony MiniDisc. I have not had a better reliable, long-term storage and unlimited reusability as the protected MiniDisc- highly overlooked audio cassette-replacement. MD ATRAC encoding blows away any MP3 audio sound quality. With the case, I would expect DVD-RAM to be a great way to archive digital photos, or would gold plated CD-Rs be best for photo storage? I’ve been told thumb drives are not likely to last 20 years? Thoughts?
CD-R’s are not a long term storage solution, the dye will slowly denature over time (within a year or two if you leave them in direct sunlight).
For long term storage on a budget, you’re best off with USB harddrives. Have at least two copies, check them once a year, and store one not at your house (in case of fire/flood/etc.).
Aehem, no! The first ATRAC sounds unbeleavable horrible, especialy compared to DAT that was used be me and all my friends. The later ATRAC was better, perhaps better than 128kbit MP3, but I have never used MP3 lower than 320kbit. MiniDisk for Data existed, but was seldom I think never used outside of Japan.
It was good 10-15 year ago. But in this day it is simply to small.
25GB Bluray with 1000Year stability. (M-Disk)
Never. The newer and bigger, the worst they became. For industrial
use there exist special ones with SLC memory inside. This alone tells you all.
Olaf
The caddy stype DVD-RAMs were soon replaced by the open style like regular DVDs. I got a bunch when I bought a Panasonic NTSC recorder that had a hard drive (20GB? or so) and a DVD recorder so I could transcibe from HDD to DVD (all formats, including DVD-RAM). IO stopped using it when NTSC died. I did get an upgraded model that supported ATSC, but that also supported “copy protect” for off-the-air broadcasts and most TV stations and/or broadcasts kept the factory default setting of copy-protect on, or at least that’s what I “felt” at the time I abandoned the Panasonic mixed DVR in favor of the newer PC based NTSC and then ATSC off-air recorders. Then I abandoned them too as they were too finicky.
So many data formats have come and went over the years, and among those HDD’s are extremely long lasting, From the RAMAC in 1956 to the current day. At the moment 12TB HDD’s (for EUR250) have the lowest cost per byte. Backing up such a HDD on blue ray is still a possibility, but juggling with 50 blue ray disks just to make a single backup would get boring extremely quickly.
Apparently some forms of tape are also still being used:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_Tape-Open
A check at a local store shows they also still sell tapes. They also have a lot of different formats: ( LTO-4, LTO-5, LTO-6 LTO-7 LTO-8, MRC90, RDX) and all have a lead time of several days, which means they have to get them from somewhere else. Tape drives are also expensive, and you would have had to buy a bunch of them to keep up with technology over the years.
HDD’s have all the read/write stuff integrated which makes them much more user friendly. HDD’s interfaces have also changed surprisingly little over the last 30 odd years. PATA (Started in 1986) & SATA (2003, still current), which are still compatible with a small adapter to serialize the data. (Various SCSI variants have also been available for a long time)
SSD’s are much faster then HDD’s but also about 5x more expensive, and their data leaks slowly, which makes them a bad choice for backups.
So HDD’s are still the way to go, both for having much data under your fingertips, and for backup. (possibly redundant NAS, or rotating HDD’s in a drawer. Any backup scheme needs redundancy).
LTO tape is somewhat backwards compatible, so an (eg) LTO-6 compatible drive will still be able to read your old LTO-5 and 4 tapes.
They’re used a lot in businesses for long term storage, so tapes are produced in large amounts and are relatively cheap. It also means you can pick up ‘last generation’ drives second hand. If you look around, you can probably find entire automatic tape libraries for cheap second-hand.
They’re not super fast, but they work well for offline backups.
This is the way I am thinking now….
But I was told that this is wrong. You need probably a 10Gig Network to feed an LTO4/5 without problems. But no personal experiance now.
Olaf
Thanks for the link on LTO!
I didn’t know it existed.
RDX is actually a cartridge with an ordinary hard drive inside. The format seems like a rip-off. There is nothing particularly special about it, but it is very expensive for what it is.
Never looked into RDX before, but indeed. It’s just 2.5″ sata drives in cartridges with some extra padding. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RDX_(disk)
Apparently Tandberg (i.e. formal tape company) also has SSD versions these days, so that closes the irony gap.
I can understand 2.5″ disks being a bit more expensive per byte then 3.5″, but over EUR200 for a “docking station” (i.e. sata to USB converter) is quite ridiculous. But it is as with many things in this “modern” world. As long as there enough rich idiots, then others will help them to get rid of their money.
SSD might close the irony gap but doesn’t that lead to worse data retention, it being flash, n’all?
Back in the latter end of the 90’s, I worked for a software company that made, amongst other things, leading file system repair utilities. We were approached by a major backer of the DVD-RAM technology to develop a special version of our repair software for DVD-RAM file system failures which could be packaged alongside the drives.
The meeting was amusing to me. A number of suits from this company came out from Japan to meet with us (an engineering team). We had been prepped with the proper etiquette for presenting business cards, which we did. One member of their team laid them out on the table in a hierarchal nature, but it was not clear from our titles who was in charge (we were all peers). “Program Manager”, “Product Manager”, “QA Engineering Manager”, “Development Manager”. When one of us would speak, this guy would assess what was said, and rearrange the hierarchy of the cards. This continued for most of the 1-2 hour meeting.
Ultimately, we declined to take them up on the project, and they seemed to have made the systems more reliable.
And then came cloud storage.
The reason DVD RW (dash and plus) were more popular was because you could burn a DVD-Video movie on them and they would work, guaranteed. This meant your blank rewritable were not only cheaper compared to blank DVD-RAM discs, but also dual-use. Also, every PC could read DVD RW (often both variants), while support for DVD-RAM was not universal. With this in mind, having to deal with sessions and the occasional disc blanking was a small price to pay.