DVD RAM
June 8th, 2005
When I first got my IBM laptop, I noticed the DVD Multiburner could utilise a feature I wasn’t familiar with, and that is to burn DVD RAM disks. If you were reading a few days ago, you would know that I had a little scare when I thought I had lost a lot of important work, so now was the time to investigate a little further into what would seem like the ideal backup medium:
- They can be recorded over 100,000 times; 100 times more so than normal DVDs.
- Hold 4.7gb of data.
- Act like a floppy disk, i.e. you don’t need specialist burning software, you just copy files straight into the disk’s directory.
I bought three disks for £12 from Comet, they’re quite expensive, but work like a treat. It took me about an hour to copy virtually everything I own onto one of the disks. Dragging and dropping files onto such a disk is a little unusual, it isn’t as quick as burning but certainly gets the job done.
I’ve been reading up on how the technology works from a Wikipedia page. Normal disks use a mixture of silver, indium, antimony and tellurium, sandwiched in a spiral groove, this groove guides the laser as it traverses the disk. The laser can heat the substrate so accurately as to crystallise some parts, and leave others alone, the laser can read this as binary. The difference with DVD RAM disks is that they don’t use this spiral. They use technology similar to that of a hard disk; many concentric circles of substrate running around the centre. Think of you at the centre of the disk, and many different sized hula hoops of data, I guess. The disks also look pretty.
June 13th, 2005 at 5:10 pm
A little hint regarding DVD RAM recording and Windows XP:
I came across a problem where XP thought the DVD RAM disk was a normal CD R / RW. The usual drag-’n-drop method of copying files that worked the first time (probably because I had freshly formatted it) didn’t work, and instead Windows XP informed me that the files were waiting to be written to the CD (damn expensive “CD”!)
Fixed this by right clicking the DVD RAM drive icon under “My Computer” clicking on the “Recording” tab, then unchecking the “Enable CD Recording on this drive”.
Now the drag-’n-drop works again.