Drive is running in CLV mode, so drive speed is location sensitive. That it runs faster than 3x is simply the drive firmware can write at faster than the specified rate for the original media spec. Drive firmware also makes a difference, having a much larger cache means it can just store updates to the inner tracks for a few dozen blocks of data, then only update the FAT areas when the cache is getting full and it has to free up cache memory. You can also see the areas of changed material as it runs the head and it changes state. If you were formatted as a non journalled file system, or writing a single large stream of data there would be no slowing down with the overhead of updating file location pointers at end of blocks. There are Linux file systems that only update state at the end of a block operation, faster but a lot riskier data wise.
@Deon Denis Or power failure. Granted, if power failure is corrupting disks with any regularity, you have other problems to fix first, but it _is_ still a way to corrupt a disk without doing anything wrong.
@Deon Denis It has nothing with Blaming a file system for user error, noting the fact that such a file system has a higher risk of errors is just stating a fact. Has nothing to do with blame.
at least the 2/3 times when the laser went to the center was the defect management doing his work into the primary spare area (trigger >= 8 PIF), cause the disk is... aaaaah 3:10 / 32:08 so...
It might be that it's FAT32 formatted instead of UDF. It probably has to stop after every filewrite just to append the file table. UDF is supposedly wear-leveled and somewhat error-corrective in a way that _won't wear out a single spot on the dvdram,_ while FAT32 definitely could and cause a disc failure eventually because it wasn't meant to be used on a delicate CD
@@maltoNitho Good Lord! How dare you both suggest that this intellectual is in any way less than captivating! How preposterous! 🧐 *JAMES! Fetch the car! We're leaving!*
Part of me likes the informality and sillier manner (now just how silly the main channel can be is up for debate), but I think PART of the interest of this channel comes because he talks more personally and less like an essay- which means the ratio of his views and experiences expressed to actual factual stuff is a little higher
I don't know if I should be worried that I find so much enjoyment watching that little red dot going back and forth as the disk is written. These electro-mechanical storage mediums (including tape) just have character.
its probalby spinning up to full speed for the verification process. so it writes the disc at slow speed and immediately reads it back at high speed. but somehow its able to write at the slower speed while the disk is spinning very fast. that would be my guess. putting many small files in larger zip files would help a lot probalby. edit: nevermind just got to the part where you did a large file. i guess it updates the FAT for every block or whatever
Such memories! I used DVD-RAM for backup for a small company. Some of the things you endured were due to XP which I never used. Try Linux drivers and you won't see these weird speed deviations. Great videos!
This explains so much, I used to think that I f**ked up my computer for asking it to save things onto a disc, now I know years later that I’m not the culprit
I think the difficulties encountered are the meat of this video. It easily shows that not all drives will behave or play nicely with DVD-RAM disks. I watched you first video on this topic and it gave me an idea of a solid media I can store images on for long term and as a tertiary backup. SSDs can fail and flash drives can fail, probably more frequently depending on use. Thanks for this. I have purchased one dual sided disk to see if I can get it to work. Great job and thanks for your content.
The easiest way to tell if a drive supports DVD-RAM is to look for the "DVD Multi Recorder" logo on the front. If it has that, it should support it. Also, that slim drive *does* sound to me like it's running at the proper speed - 3x CLV (for DVD) might only be 1800 RPM at the outer edge, but at the inner edge it's 4500 RPM. Another way of looking at it is that 3x at the inner edge is equivalent to 7.5x at the outer edge, and these slim drives usually have an 8x maximum DVD speed. It's also important that the drive writes at the proper speed for the disc - being a rewritable disc, attempting to write at lower than the correct speed does not work, so the drive *has* to spin back up to write near the inner edge after writing to the outside.
The point is that DVD-RAM is not a linear medium but a sector-based medium like a floppy or a hard disk, so it should be running at CAV. That's also why all of the sectors are arranged the way you see them, the inner tracks have less sectors on them than the outer sectors leading to a staggered pattern. Because it's an optical medium, it's not possible for the data density at the center to be larger than the data density on the edge, like is possible on a magnetic medium.
Ah, my blu-ray writer has DVD Multi Recorder logo on it (as well as the +R logo). One thing I wonder is how popular re/writable blu-ray discs are. I've never used one myself, but 25GB on a single layer disc seems to be pretty good and AU$20 for a pack of five seems pretty good. Not as convenient as a flash drive though and not a lot of new off-the-shelf machines have optical drives anymore.
@@Stoney3K Try any DVD-RAM drive you want, version 2.2 (5x) or earlier, and I can guarantee you it'll be (somewhat) CLV at least for writing. The reason isn't related to how the data is laid out on the disc, but rather how rewritable media works in general - the material needs the proper heating for the proper *time* (time is very important) to make or erase a mark. These time requirements place restrictions on the data rate the drive can write at, and especially for lower-speed discs, form a rather narrow range of acceptable speeds. And yes, I know DVD-RAM does use ZBR (different zones with different sector counts, increasing towards the outer edge). This results in the spindle speed changing in small "steps" as the drive moves through the disc but doesn't fundamentally change the fact that the spindle speed does need to change. Most magnetic media uses ZBR as well, though it's not necessary for the spindle speed to change there as magnetic media does not have the same time requirements as rewritable optical media.
@@Pommster Rewritable Blu-ray discs (BD-RE, for REwritable), not so much, but I have a BD-R drive that I used to use more for writing discs to play in my Blu-ray players and PS3 as well as a few hundred blank BD-Rs. I don't use that drive nearly as much anymore since most of the stuff I watch is on my media server (and I have a HTPC on my main entertainment TV with its own BD-R drive) but I have backed up some of the lesser to moderately important data I have to the more reliable BD-Rs amongst my collection - due to the inorganic alloys used in most BD-Rs as opposed to organic dyes used in CD-R/DVD-R (and also BD-R LTH [low-to-high] discs), the longevity of all but the shoddiest BD-R discs can last from 30 to 50 years.
So, here's my thoughts on this: DVD Spec for 1x is 1600 RPM to 570 RPM. This means 3x speed is 4,800 RPM near the disc hub, and 1710 RPM near the outer ring of the disc. When you are reading a disc, you can read the disc a pretty much any RPM anywhere on the disc, assuming the disc is stable, and you don't go outside of spec for the sensors/motor/etc. When you are burning though, the media has to be exposed to a very specific amount of laser energy to phase change the material correctly. The amount of energy received on the media from a laser is a function of the power output from the laser, the size of the focal area of the laser, and the linear speed of the media moving past the laser. The stronger the laser intensity, the more power is delivered. The tighter the focal area, the more energy is delivered per unit of area. The slower the linear speed of the media (and therefore longer exposure to the laser per unit of area), the stronger the energy received. There are a number of variables that have to be controlled for when the drive determines effective power levels before burning. On writable discs, there is an area in the pregap that the drive can practice on to calibrate the laser for the media. After that calibration is completed though, the parameters for the laser power are set. This constrains the other parameters the drive can vary during the burn. So, the drive will calculate a power level to erase, a power level to write high, a power level to write low, etc. And that power level is not necessarily linear, so you can't necessarily interpolate between 1x speed power and 3x speed power to determine what 2x power should be. This means you can't spin the disc at a constant 1710 RPM when writing the outer area of the disc to get 3x there, and when you need to write the directory info near the hub of the disc keep the RPM at 1710 and write at 1.06x speed. You can get away with that kind of stuff when reading a disc, just maintain a constant RPM and seek all over the place reading at different speeds because it is quicker than spinning up and slowing down. That strategy doesn't work when writing, because the power levels would be constantly changing, and the fidelity of the written signal would be very poor at best case, or the media could be destroyed worse case. Just imagine trying to design a drive firmware that can continually adjust power levels from the laser (assuming it is even physically possible to control it like that), and write at any possible speed between 1X and 3X, so that at any time, anywhere on the disc, the drive could immediately begin writing without waiting for the RPM to stabilize. I agree that would be VERY cool to do, but as you mentioned in the other video, DVD-RAM wasn't really taking off anyway, so the company that made the drive couldn't justify the extra development time for a selling point that most people wouldn't care about, or at least wouldn't understand.
Yep, it's tricky enough for write-once discs and only gets worse for rewritable (including DVD-RAM) - not only do rewritable discs need specific power levels, but they need specific *times* as well. Spin the disc slower, and the marks get accidentally erased as they're written. Spin it faster, and areas that should be light aren't, if you even manage to write anything at all.
@@aprilkolwey4779 I can't help but wonder with the timings whether there are quite likely physical limitations involved in how fast the substrate can undergo whatever physical state change that is going on to actually encode a bit into the physical state of the media. Hell this is a very real factor even in purely solid state media like RAM as there are still physical processes going on at the quantum mechanical level and there is a minimum time for operations to become coherent change the inputs on the address or data lines too fast and the result becomes far more probabilistic and quantum mechanical than the desired deterministic and classical output you intended.
Interesting! I know that for some drives that are operating near their motor's RPM limit, but can reach a higher data rate near the edge, they will set several "zones". So for about the first third, it'll run at 4x. Then reach a point, rev the motpr back up to full, and run at 6x for a while. Then rec up to full speed again after a bit, and run at 8x until the disc end.
My random guess as to why the BluRay does less of the speeding up, is because maybe the players come with more RAM of their own? Seeing as BluRay is quite a data stream, the laser has to be able to absorb it all in a short amount of time, so i was thinking maybe it has some cache.
Oh, yeah! The cache size may have to do something with that! I wonder how is the data processed... Could it be shoved into the drive processed, or does it need to be drip fed... Hmm...🤔
Do a lot of Blu-ray players, like, read ahead on, say, the movie that you’re about to watch in case the disc is scratched or something? I’ve only experienced a major delay with one Blu-ray player, the one at my grandparents’ house, and my dad explained that it’s probably try to get up to a gig or so of information of the video file before it can actually play. Also, do Blu-ray discs play back in CLV so they can be much more efficient of the disc’s actual physical space? I only know about this because of Alec’s series on Laserdisc, of course, but if that’s the case with Blu-rays, I wonder if all digital data has the added advantage of being able to freeze-frame any part of the movie like you can on CAV Laserdiscs.
Computer at 31:00 - "Copy operation failed. This file could not be modified." Our charming host 7 seconds later - "Doesn't look like anything's happening..." Me - "I do believe you're correct there." XD
Been using optical media since ~1993. Not sure which drives supported DVD-RAM though since, as a format/media it wasn't very popular for PC applications in the UK (as far as I'm aware - I worked in the PC industry here from 1997-2007). Zip drives however were heavily marketed, including by my company. DVD-RAM support was never even a discussion to be honest. Edit: Should probably have mentioned that I enjoyed both the main and second channel videos on this topic, and on many other topics. Thanks for the great content :-)
Panasonic always championed DVD-RAM, I think it was a format they developed. Most if not all Panasonic manufactured DVD drives can handle a DVD-RAM disc, I am not sure what other makes did, I know I had a Toshiba DVD-RAM video recorder so if Toshiba made DVD drives they probably also made DVD-RAM compatible drives.
Just a personal observation - some CD/DVD/Blu-Ray drives really don't like when you operate them without the top cover. Once I was doing some project with an CD drive that had it's enclosure removed, and I discovered that I could have introduced reading error every time when I moved my desk lamp over the opened drive during operation. I guess it depends on the quality of the drive (anti reflection coating on the lens, IR filter, quality of photo-receptor in the laser caddy etc.). Just saying.
True, but it's for slightly unintuitive reasons. It depends on the spectrum of the light source and not its intensity. A true green LED flashlight shouldn't interfere, even if you shine it an inch above where the laser is reading a spinning disc (any disc; Bluray, CD or DVD). Even if the green LED is a blue LED with a green phosphor, it'll probably be okay to shine on a CD/DVD being read, just maybe not a Bluray. The advantage/reason for a green phosphor is it allows a wider variety of green hues to be manufactured cheaply and possibly a higher intensity green than a true green LED can emit. A true amber/orange LED should be okay, but some exotic blue diode with orange phosphor based LED could interfere with both blue and red lasers (blue from the blue LED and red from a broad orange phosphor). Since non-phosphor based LEDs are so monochromatic, RGB white could be made with a Red and Blue that are selected to not interfere with the wavelength of the red and blue lasers. Even though it's possible, the color rendering index will probably be bad. Get a handheld diffraction grating based spectroscope like the kind used in science classes (they're about ten bucks) if you intend to test lights for interference, or if you want to make an RGB light that wont interfere. Or, just because they're handy on rare occasions. The angle of the light, labels on discs and other factors can also prevent interference, but that's not really an exception to interference. P.S. In the future, I expect manufacturers to start making ultra-super-bright-eyeball-melting LEDs by substituting a blue laser diode for the blue LED with whatever phosphor to get the color they want. At that point they're arguably not LEDs, but marketing and manufacturers don't care about details like that if they're still functionally interchangeable. And it could be a blue laser pumped by a blue LED, so technically it would be a hybrid.
All optical drives are not intended to operate normally when open, therefore you cannot expect normal behaviour during these tests. For what its worth, I suggest that you revisit the tests with the room lights out, a low lux video camera, and if necessary an infra-red illuminator adjusted to give minimum illumination across the drive rather than directly onto it!
Given how this is not a new video, someone may have already mentioned this, but your issues with formatting the DVD-RAM on XP may be because CD burning is enabled. It sounds counter-intuitive, but I had to do it to format my DVD-RAM disc. To disable it, right click the drive and go to properties, it should be in one of the tabs there.
I thought DVD-RAM uses zones of CLV sectors so it needs to change speeds depending where on the disc they are. Faster near the center, slower at the outer edge. If the format were CAV, the sector markers would be in a radial line from the center with the same number of sectors per track/rotation. But if you look at the sector markers, there are fewer sectors near the middle, more nearer the edge, so CLV. Basically like CLV LaserDiscs but the sector zones are more obvious. It can't use the same speed by design.
But it should still be able to write a given track at a slower speed than that track is designed for, just by slowing down the bits going to the laser diode, right?
It can write data at a slower speed, or should be able to. if it had a bigger cash or was it more expensive Drive than it could write more files before I have to write the boot record
I had that exact Netbook and it was awesome! Back when I was in college, I had my desktop running in my room and had the predecessor to OneDrive which was Microsoft Sync and it would allow you to sync files between two systems without having to push them to the cloud storage so I would take that netbook to class and type notes on it and then have them on my desktop when I would get back. Kind of a server-client setup but VPN-less because it was done by an agent on both systems. Mine came with XP as well, but I ultimately upgraded the hard drive in the netbook to a 32GB SSD and increased the RAM in it and got Windows 7 Home running on it and disabled windows aero on it and changed the theme to Windows 7 basic and it ran pretty well. Pretty cool seeing this one on your video and still running!
Robin Persaud, i used to have one of those mad 40+ drives years ago and it was really annoying when it was determined to go warp 9. It damaged disks and wasted so much time. DriveSpeed helped a lot. Older slower drives often did the job better without all the messing around.
I have Nero I've never tried using during a burn disc ... my impression was that was for reading processes ... some functions of Nero locks the drive ... if memory serves me correctly burning is one that Nero locks the drive so programs such as drive speed can NOT influence the drive's speed ... I may be wrong though LOL I remember you can tell Nero at which speed you want to burn a disc (it depends on the drive itself as well)
@@Nibbleminx Yes. Using Ext2 format and isolinux - I have several full systems on dvd-ram for emulation - boot straight into linux running the emulator of my choice.
30:10 - "Haaaayyyyy! Removable device detected!" I think he got way more excited about that than is socially acceptable. lol jk On a side note, I love this long-play format. I for one vote to keep making them from time to time alongside your regular videos.
I found some of these DVD-RAM disks at my job in 2018(we have drawers full of old stuff). I put it in a DVD drive and it worked. I wrote some videos to it and it worked fine. When I tried to write a folder with a bunch of files the drive damn near caught fire. Thank God for USB flash drives.
I still have DVD-RAM's with various shows I recorded from the television years ago using a Panasonic recorder. I can play them back on my laptop using the built-in CD/DVD drive which also supports DVD-RAM and using the VLC media player app. If I wanted to copy a full DVD-RAM to the desktop of my computer, it would take about 25 minutes to transfer.
Wow! I never knew that there was a way to play DVD-RAM videos on a PC... I guess this is yet another reason to love VLC. I guess I haven't really looked into it for awhile... Just plain had given up... I loved my Pana Recorder, it was way better than tape, since you could erase individual shows to make space for new ones...
I had an Acer Aspire One, except mine was blue. It was the only computer I had at that period in my life. Mine had a puny 1024x600 display, but I made it work, if you can believe it, and I wrote code on it all night, on that tiny little keyboard. This was back in 2009. Memories!
DVD-RAM works fine on Linux. In the past the UDF-Driver was not part of every mainstream distro (i.e. Slackware), but after compiling it, it worked fine. Using other file systems (ext2, fat32, ...) worked out of the box, if I remember correctly.
Little correction: the filesystem driver is in the kernel, just the commandline tools have to be added to Slackware, but reading and writing UDF, fat32, ... works out of the box
Windows uses write-through caches by default on removable drives, whereas Linux uses the same kind of write-back caches as are used on fixed drives. As a result, Linux should be able to bunch together writes of more than one file without going to update the metadata after each single file, and as a result should be much faster. Just check that your distro doesn't use the sync mount option. You could also try going to device manager and turning on write-back cache for the DVD drive on Windows. On Windows 8.1, this seems to be on the Policies tab in the device properties, at least for USB drives. I don't see it for my DVD drive, but I don't know if it supports DVD-RAM or if the tabs would change if I inserted a DVD-RAM disc. The reason Windows does this is so people can remove their USB drives (and floppies etc.) without using the safe removal feature and still usually have their files intact. On a DVD drive software is in control of when the disc gets ejected, so there should be no reason to use write-through caches, but possibly Windows does not take this into account and just uses write-through caches on all removable drives.
Jamin, since ChromeOS is based on the Linux kernel it should have behave correctly as Torsten and Henri said. That's kinda weird that Alec couldn't write on with its Chromebook, maybe Google removed this part on kernel compilation to shrink its size.
Journal file systems have to check the file after every right and then verify it and then write down its location on the boot record as a successful burn. It is faster to do it all at once but it means that if the burn is interrupted, then the disk doesn't have a record of the file and has to restart at the last boot record or journal entry.
Your video just reminded me that i have a DVD-RAM laying aroud somewhere. So I tried it after many years, still works. I was excited what i would find on it. Nah nothing special, just a trailer of Matrix Revolutions for some reason. I like just have one but i like the format, its a pretty shiny disc in a nice caddy. Nice video btw!
35:24 The read graph suggests constant linear velocity as the read speed has plateaued, as opposed to the near linear increase at the start which suggests constant angular velocity as read speed and thus linear velocity is increasing.
The thing is, the drive itself doesn't have the context to know that it's only going to write a single sector at the spindle. I suspect the desktop drives have stronger motors so they can spin up and down faster. That does require a lot more power which probably is a limitation on external drives. They may also have slightly smarter firmware that can be adjusting the spin rate while stepping which would reduce the delays too. There is another factor that makes a big difference, though: caching. If the OS caches the file system metadata, then there is less seek time involved since that would reduce the writes to "track 0". Also, drive level caching can potentially do some reordering of physical writes so there would potentially need to be a lot fewer seeks (and associated speed changes) for physical writing.
Thanks for another fun video. I dusted off my old DVD-RAM discs and did some poking around... I have a desktop ASUS drive that I love, except for DVD-RAMs apparently. Man, what an awful garbage fire. 1.5x erase, 0.7x erase. So much for 3x discs (verification, blah blah). I loved these when they came out but they don't hold a candle to anything else. It's funny how tech slingshots then stagnates. Thanks again for the ramble.
All DVD/CDROM etc... use constant linear speed , that means that all of them change rotational speed depending on how far from the center they are to maintain a constant sector density. So, that speed-up/speed-down when writting is totally normal and unavoidable on FAT32 because the main fat block is at 0. That's the reason why there are other formats more appropiate for CD access. They usually have more index blocks scattered thru the disk, so the head doesn't have to move that much. The Desktop drive is just using a better motor, and has more cache.
6:06 - most laser pickups doesn't like to operate with top (non-translucent) cover off! Some light from your studio lighting setup can go through the disk's plastic and overexpose the photodiode (matrix or receiver) of laser head. @ 9:00 you can see a laser dot which proves that the disk itself is translucent to at least red component of your studio light
Looks like I’m not the only one favoring having two optical drives in my desktop computer. I got two Asus BD drives installed, one of them was from a previous computer and the new one I bought especially for burning M-Disc media. I really like optical media, I treasure my Pioneer DVD DVR as it’s a great piece of conversion technology for transferring analogue video to the digital domain. I wish modern computers still had floppy interfaces on their motherboards but sadly the disappeared about 10 years ago. A good reason to keep some older PC’s around.
I wonder, does anyone remember the Nero InCD tool? It allowed to format even regular CD-RW discs to UDF FS and then use them just like DVD-RAM (it was possible to write/delete files on the disc using any program, just like with flash drive. And it required a driver to read the disc (the driver for a CD disk!), which was burned to the CD itself and was the only data available on the disc w/o the driver)
Two years later: I used to do many tests with Nero InCD when I was a teenager, it was amazing but I needed InCD installed on all the computers I wanted que CD-RW to be read on. I just thought about it when I saw the UDF selection in the Windows format tool.
My guess is because the Bluray drive would have a much larger cache for buffering the larger files off of a bluray disc, so it would be able to cache larger chunks of data. That would allow it to reference the sector data less frequently.
I used to have the same or similar laptop of the Acer Aspire and as a kid i absolutely loved the crap out of it. Such a good laptop with a great keyboard.
I've heard several different pronunciations of "ASUS", so I'm not sure which one is correct. What I *DO* know is that the parent company is named 'Pegatron', and that both names were inspired by the Pegasus, a winged horse creature from old Greek legends. A sister company to ASUS is As-Rock.
If I recall, I actually used to use a utility that could artificially cap the read/write speed of my drive for noise reasons. I wonder if that would actually help the slimdrive as a side effect.
8:26 Unplugging the drive usually solves that problem especially if it stops responding. Essentially it causes the operating system (windows in your case, linux mint in my case) to wait indefinitely until the drive reports back, which it never does. As soon as it's unplugged, it gives an error, and everything resumes.
I'd just like to interject for a moment... What you're referring to as ChromeOS is actually ChromeOS/GNU/Linux (actually don't know how much of GNU is actually in ChromeOS but I couldn't resist)
Love this! I feel better now.....I have 3 PCs, 1 desktop, 2 laptops of varying ages ( not discussing the iPad and KindleFire), running various iterations of Windows, and I occasionally get them all up and running just for the sheer hell of seeing who can do what, and why. I just installed my scanner driver on all three, why not? Now I really want to get an external drive so I can load software on the drive less Windows 10 laptop....No, these drivers aren't on the web, at least for free... Photo editing software. Fun stuff to see other people doing these kinds of things, thanks!,, I should get maybe get out more, or some.
Some points about the video. First the back-and-forth can be a result of operating system's way of handling things. Operating systems keep journals in the file systems to recover from power loss in order to avoid power losses. This limits the number of files/bytes that has been written in a single write. So it might be the reason of going back and forth. File system scheduler of Windows is not the best of its kind. You can try MacOS or Linux (ChromeOS uses completely software stack so it's not considered a "regular" Linux). But more importantly I think that the hardware buffers of optical drives play a bigger role here. They might be optimized for sequential reading since most of the variants are read that way. This also explains why Blu-Ray drive is much faster than DVD and doesn't go back-and-forth every so often. Since Blu-Ray discs has significantly more capacity and higher bitrates they need larger buffers. More buffer space means you can put many files to the buffer and schedule the writes in order to write sectors next to each other in a single run. However, the smaller buffer of DVD drives can only store a limited number of files which can cause many discrete writes. Finally, I want to say I love your videos. You're covering the technologies that fascinated me back then when I was a computer geek teenager. I wish that I wasn't a broke student and could be your patron. Please accept my appreciation for keeping your videos going.
Journals are a file system feature, not an operating system feature, and neither FAT nor UDF are journaling filesystems, so I doubt it's because of "how an operating system does things." FAT won't be journaled on Linux or Mac OS either because that's just not a feature of the file system. There's no generic "journal" an operating system uses for all filesystems, it's entirely based on the FS. It might have to do with Windows' I/O scheduler, but somehow I doubt it. What do you mean by "completely software stack?" Ther kernel is still software... Do you mean something like it does everything in userspace? I don't think that's true... Linux is not a microkernel, a lot has to be done by the Linux kernel even in ChromeOS and Android...
DVD-RAM was used a lot in the commercial sector and briefly in home use however failed to catch on. I have a Hitachi DVD camcorder that used 2.5 inch minidisc that worked great when used by itself but remember having to use special software to convert or read the VOB files from it to store on hard drives. Now I can not find new DVD-RAM minidisc anywhere!. It will record to DVD-R minidisc up to 4.7 GB (30 minutes only and not enough for most movies) Also the ram minidisc had a special cartridge like container where you could not touch the disc surface because they are not easy to clean.
DVD-RAM was also my go to medium when work banned USB Flash drives... Fortunately, DVD Multi Recorders were pretty much standard equipment at the time... CD or DVD RW just didn't cut it, mostly due to the eventual need to "format" the disk to recover "erased" space. I don't think I ever met anyone who actually knew what DVD-RAM was, they just seemed to think it was just another DVD RW format. They were shocked when I showed them how well they actually worked when compared to CD or DVD RW, yes it was slower than a flash drive, but when work bans them DVD-RAM was the best alternative... I also have a DVD-RAM TV recorder(s), it was simply awesome, used quite a bit till the digital transition/HDTV... Just learned today that I can actually access/play the video on my PC... Now, where are those disks, and I wonder what kind of "treasure" is on them... I really think that initially the cost of entry is what kept many people away from DVD-RAM, and by the time DVD-RAM was "fully supported by many/most drives usb flash drives became larger and more affordable, and had the advantage of being able to go into a pocket or hang from a strap. And that pretty much spelled the end of DVD-RAM. If the same technology could be used with Blu Ray, I think it would make for what I would think would be a great archive/backup medium... But at 100 to 128GB, it's a little small, when compared to the size of HDD's today (10 plus disks per TB seems a little much)... There also would be a need for a DVD Multi Recorder version/type of Blu Ray recorders to come out and become the "norm" to reduce the entry price down, and the media price would also need to be really reasonable. I would really love to have access to an reasonably priced easily reused Optical Drive/media, with a large storage capacity that I could use for backups and data archival... I guess that's my pipe dream.... Love this and other channel...
For the netbook Peppermint would be a good low-resource option. For the laptop with 4 gig of memory just about any distro would do. Linux Mint or Ubuntu would do just fine.
That's what I have set up on my KAV60 (might be the model he has). Linux Mint 19.1. Biggest disadvntage is finding a browser that will run on it that still supports the Offline GoogleDocs extension (there still isn't a version for Firefox)
ooh! i do still love my netbook, assumingly running with an n270 :) "inspiron mini 10v" with xubuntu/linux. it's my holiday machine to fiddle around with photos i've taken or check social media or so. still a loveable item with a cpu benchmark of 269 :D i doubled the ram and replaced my hdd by an ssd. it took me three of these with different kinds of physical defects to make my own and another one for a friend of mine, a year ago, as a christmas present. both perfectly intact. third one a whole mess of broken parts. she loved mine on holidays we spent together, that's why :) how cool you still have a netbook running, too! :')
26:50, It could be chunking/binning/? multiple blocks of data at a time and writing tracking(?) information later, after each superblock. Each block is either 512 or 4096 bytes according to UDF specs.. (likely 4096 for DVD-RAM)
one of the main reasons blocking dvd-ram was that you could use any file system with it, and that the "other" computer did support this files system out of the box unless it had the same operating system.
4:16 Not all DVD burners can do RAM, around 2003-2005 the only ones compatible with the format were some LG, Asus and Nec drives. at the end of 2005 it was near imposible to find a drive not capable of writing them, the same goes for DVD + (most HP drives did support them) and lightscribe as you pointed out on another video. your experience mostly comes from "newer" drives. I did have the luck to work during 2005 on an electronics store that specialized on CD and DVD media (almost all our customers were bootleggers) so i had access to a lot of drive types and media.
@Technology Connections 2 You should check out the file copy utility TeraCopy. Would give you more information and more control over your transfers. Great job on this extra content! It's weird admitting that I like this overly complicated explanation. Cheers!
he is the kind of guy who replies to every notification, pop-up on computer.... thanking the computer.... r u canadian? nah... too nice to be Canadian.... what breed of human are you?
Great series of videos on this subject. Speaking of stupid firmware my friend had a btc brand drive that if it had problems reading a disc instead of waiting for it to slow down it would spin it to warp speed and then eject and launch the disc across the room. And this was not a failed or weak laser but a known fault.
You can format drives in any Windows supported format thought diskpart, don't need XP for that. Just open diskpart (from the search or the cmd), type lis vol to list the volumes, sel vol X: to select the right volume and then for quick fs=FILESYTEM label=LABEL. You can type help from within the diskpart to learn more
Since we talk about less than 10MB/s I'm not sure if the speed connection is relevant at this point. There was IDE (PATA) DVD burner back in the days and they performed at more than 3x As others said, the cache on the drive seems to be the major bottleneck.
@degru5091 Many usb dvd drives require the power adapter or a second plug on the Y usb cable for two ports worth of power to burn, reading with 1 is fine. I have the asus one, also the full size usb 3.0 bluray external which is faster in every way and has its own power brick. Laptop style drives are just slow.
At 9:40 , the fact that it measures its deleting speed in "Items/s" is very stupid, since different items have different sizes and different types of files take longer than others to be edited/ deleted...
Usually a filesystem only has to delete the pointer to a file for the file to count as 'deleted'. Fast and easy. That's probably why it's meaured in files/s instead of a bitrate speed. Recovery software just scans for orphaned data and allows you to make a new pointer for it rather than doing any actual "restoration". 👋
hehe I found me some DVD-RAM disks at work in a cuboard that I remember seeing them in when we were clearing things out and I was confused on what they actually were for as well. This box was a pack of 5 and still sealed. Did some testing with them and I might be able to explain some things on the chrombook part of this. Since chromeOS is using what is pretty much linux I found that only the older UDF format of 2.01 is supported for writing. Everything after that is only supported for reading on that OS. After reformatting my test disk here with 2.01 I was able to use the disk pretty much like a flash drive in linux. Its just so odd to be able to write to optical media like this without having to need any type of burning software at all :) the drive just knows what to do. Let me know if you ever are in need of some new old stock disks and I would be happy to send you a couple from this box.
“Media from Grandpa’s funeral” i got the chills after reading that. so sorry for your loss :(
Drive is running in CLV mode, so drive speed is location sensitive. That it runs faster than 3x is simply the drive firmware can write at faster than the specified rate for the original media spec. Drive firmware also makes a difference, having a much larger cache means it can just store updates to the inner tracks for a few dozen blocks of data, then only update the FAT areas when the cache is getting full and it has to free up cache memory.
You can also see the areas of changed material as it runs the head and it changes state. If you were formatted as a non journalled file system, or writing a single large stream of data there would be no slowing down with the overhead of updating file location pointers at end of blocks. There are Linux file systems that only update state at the end of a block operation, faster but a lot riskier data wise.
I had a feeling it had something to do with the amount of cache memory. The Bluray drive probably has tons more cache ram to play with.
@Deon Denis
Or power failure. Granted, if power failure is corrupting disks with any regularity, you have other problems to fix first, but it _is_ still a way to corrupt a disk without doing anything wrong.
@Deon Denis It has nothing with Blaming a file system for user error, noting the fact that such a file system has a higher risk of errors is just stating a fact. Has nothing to do with blame.
at least the 2/3 times when the laser went to the center was the defect management doing his work into the primary spare area (trigger >= 8 PIF), cause the disk is... aaaaah 3:10 / 32:08 so...
It might be that it's FAT32 formatted instead of UDF. It probably has to stop after every filewrite just to append the file table.
UDF is supposedly wear-leveled and somewhat error-corrective in a way that _won't wear out a single spot on the dvdram,_ while FAT32 definitely could and cause a disc failure eventually because it wasn't meant to be used on a delicate CD
"I wonder if my laptop's drive does DVDRam..?"
.. looks at side of laptop...
..
....
...
.... "Hey, my laptop doesn't have a DVD drive!!!"
Lol true
Same here, where did it go?
Mine has a spot where you could install one, but no drive. Just a plastic cover on the port opening...
Mine has one of those "SuperDrive" things that can write anything other than Blu-Rays (It isn't that new)
@Another Channel
You can get a caddy for about $10 that will let you install a second HDD or SSD in that space.
For some reason this is the more interesting side of you.
True. The off-the-cuff videos are "more real" than any of the produced videos. Neither are bad though.
@@maltoNitho Good Lord! How dare you both suggest that this intellectual is in any way less than captivating! How preposterous! 🧐
*JAMES! Fetch the car! We're leaving!*
rayman1113 Nailed it. Lol.
Part of me likes the informality and sillier manner (now just how silly the main channel can be is up for debate), but I think PART of the interest of this channel comes because he talks more personally and less like an essay- which means the ratio of his views and experiences expressed to actual factual stuff is a little higher
I don't know if I should be worried that I find so much enjoyment watching that little red dot going back and forth as the disk is written. These electro-mechanical storage mediums (including tape) just have character.
Ever thought about doing a video on how the cubbies behind you are set up? I'm interested in how you backlight it in particular. I love the concept.
And 2 year later, he made today a video about it
Your wish has been granted. *stops the timer*
This video... long. Very long. The ramifications are unknown, but surely there will be some.
RAMifications? hmm...
the
RAMifications?
:D
Edit: dammit, Jagh
its probalby spinning up to full speed for the verification process. so it writes the disc at slow speed and immediately reads it back at high speed. but somehow its able to write at the slower speed while the disk is spinning very fast. that would be my guess. putting many small files in larger zip files would help a lot probalby.
edit: nevermind just got to the part where you did a large file. i guess it updates the FAT for every block or whatever
uh-soos
If 36 minutes is considered "very long," my hour long walkthrough videos on iMac video card baking surely must cause Millennials to have spasms! :-)
This is the first time I've watched a video in 2x speed, worked very well for this format.
But did you speed up every time you had to return to start of the video?
I have a hard time watching videos at regular speed anymore.
Over the last few months and years I watched all of your videos and this one is especially nice. I love your videos, you really have a gift!
Such memories! I used DVD-RAM for backup for a small company. Some of the things you endured were due to XP which I never used. Try Linux drivers and you won't see these weird speed deviations. Great videos!
This explains so much, I used to think that I f**ked up my computer for asking it to save things onto a disc, now I know years later that I’m not the culprit
I think the difficulties encountered are the meat of this video. It easily shows that not all drives will behave or play nicely with DVD-RAM disks. I watched you first video on this topic and it gave me an idea of a solid media I can store images on for long term and as a tertiary backup. SSDs can fail and flash drives can fail, probably more frequently depending on use. Thanks for this. I have purchased one dual sided disk to see if I can get it to work. Great job and thanks for your content.
The easiest way to tell if a drive supports DVD-RAM is to look for the "DVD Multi Recorder" logo on the front. If it has that, it should support it.
Also, that slim drive *does* sound to me like it's running at the proper speed - 3x CLV (for DVD) might only be 1800 RPM at the outer edge, but at the inner edge it's 4500 RPM. Another way of looking at it is that 3x at the inner edge is equivalent to 7.5x at the outer edge, and these slim drives usually have an 8x maximum DVD speed. It's also important that the drive writes at the proper speed for the disc - being a rewritable disc, attempting to write at lower than the correct speed does not work, so the drive *has* to spin back up to write near the inner edge after writing to the outside.
The point is that DVD-RAM is not a linear medium but a sector-based medium like a floppy or a hard disk, so it should be running at CAV. That's also why all of the sectors are arranged the way you see them, the inner tracks have less sectors on them than the outer sectors leading to a staggered pattern. Because it's an optical medium, it's not possible for the data density at the center to be larger than the data density on the edge, like is possible on a magnetic medium.
actually you have touch same subject I touched in my comment
have a read
Ah, my blu-ray writer has DVD Multi Recorder logo on it (as well as the +R logo). One thing I wonder is how popular re/writable blu-ray discs are. I've never used one myself, but 25GB on a single layer disc seems to be pretty good and AU$20 for a pack of five seems pretty good.
Not as convenient as a flash drive though and not a lot of new off-the-shelf machines have optical drives anymore.
@@Stoney3K Try any DVD-RAM drive you want, version 2.2 (5x) or earlier, and I can guarantee you it'll be (somewhat) CLV at least for writing. The reason isn't related to how the data is laid out on the disc, but rather how rewritable media works in general - the material needs the proper heating for the proper *time* (time is very important) to make or erase a mark. These time requirements place restrictions on the data rate the drive can write at, and especially for lower-speed discs, form a rather narrow range of acceptable speeds.
And yes, I know DVD-RAM does use ZBR (different zones with different sector counts, increasing towards the outer edge). This results in the spindle speed changing in small "steps" as the drive moves through the disc but doesn't fundamentally change the fact that the spindle speed does need to change. Most magnetic media uses ZBR as well, though it's not necessary for the spindle speed to change there as magnetic media does not have the same time requirements as rewritable optical media.
@@Pommster Rewritable Blu-ray discs (BD-RE, for REwritable), not so much, but I have a BD-R drive that I used to use more for writing discs to play in my Blu-ray players and PS3 as well as a few hundred blank BD-Rs. I don't use that drive nearly as much anymore since most of the stuff I watch is on my media server (and I have a HTPC on my main entertainment TV with its own BD-R drive) but I have backed up some of the lesser to moderately important data I have to the more reliable BD-Rs amongst my collection - due to the inorganic alloys used in most BD-Rs as opposed to organic dyes used in CD-R/DVD-R (and also BD-R LTH [low-to-high] discs), the longevity of all but the shoddiest BD-R discs can last from 30 to 50 years.
This has become my favorite youtube channel. You're an extremely engaging host.
So, here's my thoughts on this: DVD Spec for 1x is 1600 RPM to 570 RPM. This means 3x speed is 4,800 RPM near the disc hub, and 1710 RPM near the outer ring of the disc.
When you are reading a disc, you can read the disc a pretty much any RPM anywhere on the disc, assuming the disc is stable, and you don't go outside of spec for the sensors/motor/etc. When you are burning though, the media has to be exposed to a very specific amount of laser energy to phase change the material correctly. The amount of energy received on the media from a laser is a function of the power output from the laser, the size of the focal area of the laser, and the linear speed of the media moving past the laser.
The stronger the laser intensity, the more power is delivered. The tighter the focal area, the more energy is delivered per unit of area. The slower the linear speed of the media (and therefore longer exposure to the laser per unit of area), the stronger the energy received.
There are a number of variables that have to be controlled for when the drive determines effective power levels before burning. On writable discs, there is an area in the pregap that the drive can practice on to calibrate the laser for the media. After that calibration is completed though, the parameters for the laser power are set. This constrains the other parameters the drive can vary during the burn.
So, the drive will calculate a power level to erase, a power level to write high, a power level to write low, etc. And that power level is not necessarily linear, so you can't necessarily interpolate between 1x speed power and 3x speed power to determine what 2x power should be. This means you can't spin the disc at a constant 1710 RPM when writing the outer area of the disc to get 3x there, and when you need to write the directory info near the hub of the disc keep the RPM at 1710 and write at 1.06x speed.
You can get away with that kind of stuff when reading a disc, just maintain a constant RPM and seek all over the place reading at different speeds because it is quicker than spinning up and slowing down. That strategy doesn't work when writing, because the power levels would be constantly changing, and the fidelity of the written signal would be very poor at best case, or the media could be destroyed worse case.
Just imagine trying to design a drive firmware that can continually adjust power levels from the laser (assuming it is even physically possible to control it like that), and write at any possible speed between 1X and 3X, so that at any time, anywhere on the disc, the drive could immediately begin writing without waiting for the RPM to stabilize. I agree that would be VERY cool to do, but as you mentioned in the other video, DVD-RAM wasn't really taking off anyway, so the company that made the drive couldn't justify the extra development time for a selling point that most people wouldn't care about, or at least wouldn't understand.
Yep, it's tricky enough for write-once discs and only gets worse for rewritable (including DVD-RAM) - not only do rewritable discs need specific power levels, but they need specific *times* as well. Spin the disc slower, and the marks get accidentally erased as they're written. Spin it faster, and areas that should be light aren't, if you even manage to write anything at all.
@@aprilkolwey4779 I can't help but wonder with the timings whether there are quite likely physical limitations involved in how fast the substrate can undergo whatever physical state change that is going on to actually encode a bit into the physical state of the media. Hell this is a very real factor even in purely solid state media like RAM as there are still physical processes going on at the quantum mechanical level and there is a minimum time for operations to become coherent change the inputs on the address or data lines too fast and the result becomes far more probabilistic and quantum mechanical than the desired deterministic and classical output you intended.
Interesting!
I know that for some drives that are operating near their motor's RPM limit, but can reach a higher data rate near the edge, they will set several "zones".
So for about the first third, it'll run at 4x. Then reach a point, rev the motpr back up to full, and run at 6x for a while. Then rec up to full speed again after a bit, and run at 8x until the disc end.
My random guess as to why the BluRay does less of the speeding up, is because maybe the players come with more RAM of their own?
Seeing as BluRay is quite a data stream, the laser has to be able to absorb it all in a short amount of time, so i was thinking maybe it has some cache.
Oh, yeah! The cache size may have to do something with that! I wonder how is the data processed... Could it be shoved into the drive processed, or does it need to be drip fed... Hmm...🤔
Yep, I was thinking about buffer size, as well
That's just what I was about to comment as well; the Blu-Ray drive can probably just cache a lot more inner-track writes into a single operation.
higher transfer rate at a slower disc speed. nothing to do with cache size
Do a lot of Blu-ray players, like, read ahead on, say, the movie that you’re about to watch in case the disc is scratched or something? I’ve only experienced a major delay with one Blu-ray player, the one at my grandparents’ house, and my dad explained that it’s probably try to get up to a gig or so of information of the video file before it can actually play. Also, do Blu-ray discs play back in CLV so they can be much more efficient of the disc’s actual physical space? I only know about this because of Alec’s series on Laserdisc, of course, but if that’s the case with Blu-rays, I wonder if all digital data has the added advantage of being able to freeze-frame any part of the movie like you can on CAV Laserdiscs.
Was waiting for the disc to fly out when it spun up lol, great video
This puts me to sleep so well for whatever reason and it's great thank you
Computer at 31:00 - "Copy operation failed. This file could not be modified."
Our charming host 7 seconds later - "Doesn't look like anything's happening..."
Me - "I do believe you're correct there." XD
It always fascinated me how beautiful dvd ram is.
Been using optical media since ~1993. Not sure which drives supported DVD-RAM though since, as a format/media it wasn't very popular for PC applications in the UK (as far as I'm aware - I worked in the PC industry here from 1997-2007). Zip drives however were heavily marketed, including by my company. DVD-RAM support was never even a discussion to be honest.
Edit: Should probably have mentioned that I enjoyed both the main and second channel videos on this topic, and on many other topics. Thanks for the great content :-)
Panasonic always championed DVD-RAM, I think it was a format they developed. Most if not all Panasonic manufactured DVD drives can handle a DVD-RAM disc, I am not sure what other makes did, I know I had a Toshiba DVD-RAM video recorder so if Toshiba made DVD drives they probably also made DVD-RAM compatible drives.
This must be the one time in history that cancelling a write session took less time than letting it finish.
The "unprepared" format is a nice change of pace (not to say I don't like the others!), keep up the great work. :)
Just a personal observation - some CD/DVD/Blu-Ray drives really don't like when you operate them without the top cover. Once I was doing some project with an CD drive that had it's enclosure removed, and I discovered that I could have introduced reading error every time when I moved my desk lamp over the opened drive during operation. I guess it depends on the quality of the drive (anti reflection coating on the lens, IR filter, quality of photo-receptor in the laser caddy etc.). Just saying.
True, but it's for slightly unintuitive reasons. It depends on the spectrum of the light source and not its intensity.
A true green LED flashlight shouldn't interfere, even if you shine it an inch above where the laser is reading a spinning disc (any disc; Bluray, CD or DVD). Even if the green LED is a blue LED with a green phosphor, it'll probably be okay to shine on a CD/DVD being read, just maybe not a Bluray. The advantage/reason for a green phosphor is it allows a wider variety of green hues to be manufactured cheaply and possibly a higher intensity green than a true green LED can emit.
A true amber/orange LED should be okay, but some exotic blue diode with orange phosphor based LED could interfere with both blue and red lasers (blue from the blue LED and red from a broad orange phosphor).
Since non-phosphor based LEDs are so monochromatic, RGB white could be made with a Red and Blue that are selected to not interfere with the wavelength of the red and blue lasers. Even though it's possible, the color rendering index will probably be bad.
Get a handheld diffraction grating based spectroscope like the kind used in science classes (they're about ten bucks) if you intend to test lights for interference, or if you want to make an RGB light that wont interfere. Or, just because they're handy on rare occasions.
The angle of the light, labels on discs and other factors can also prevent interference, but that's not really an exception to interference.
P.S. In the future, I expect manufacturers to start making ultra-super-bright-eyeball-melting LEDs by substituting a blue laser diode for the blue LED with whatever phosphor to get the color they want. At that point they're arguably not LEDs, but marketing and manufacturers don't care about details like that if they're still functionally interchangeable. And it could be a blue laser pumped by a blue LED, so technically it would be a hybrid.
That's probaly true. At least it is not designed to work uncovered and there are warnings not to operate without cover.
All optical drives are not intended to operate normally when open, therefore you cannot expect normal behaviour during these tests. For what its worth, I suggest that you revisit the tests with the room lights out, a low lux video camera, and if necessary an infra-red illuminator adjusted to give minimum illumination across the drive rather than directly onto it!
Given how this is not a new video, someone may have already mentioned this, but your issues with formatting the DVD-RAM on XP may be because CD burning is enabled. It sounds counter-intuitive, but I had to do it to format my DVD-RAM disc. To disable it, right click the drive and go to properties, it should be in one of the tabs there.
I really like the format of the stuff on this channel, it compliments your other channel very nicely! Good work!
5:20 Your computer may be at risk! Poor Windows XP. 😂
Your computer *might* be at risk
God I allways had that error
Hi ,you are one of my favorite people, I like your content ,very sarcastic , funny and professional. Keep the good 👍 Job.
I thought DVD-RAM uses zones of CLV sectors so it needs to change speeds depending where on the disc they are. Faster near the center, slower at the outer edge.
If the format were CAV, the sector markers would be in a radial line from the center with the same number of sectors per track/rotation. But if you look at the sector markers, there are fewer sectors near the middle, more nearer the edge, so CLV.
Basically like CLV LaserDiscs but the sector zones are more obvious.
It can't use the same speed by design.
But it should still be able to write a given track at a slower speed than that track is designed for, just by slowing down the bits going to the laser diode, right?
It can write data at a slower speed, or should be able to. if it had a bigger cash or was it more expensive Drive than it could write more files before I have to write the boot record
@@IDoNotLikeHandlesOnYT Yes, but the laser power probably needs to be adjusted.
The speed at which its spinning in open air is slightly terrifying
OMG YOU HAVE ROLLER COASTER TYCOON ON YOUR NETBOOK!!!
Props for stating that DVD-RAM is "wicked slow".
As a fellow New Englander, the term "wicked" is entirely underutilized outside of the Notheast.
And pretty much its exact equivalent in Northern California would be "hella".
Poop and laughter made me laugh pretty hard. The dichotomy of that phrase and what you WANTED to say is hilarious.
Yeah, these problems make me realize how much better USB sticks are! Long Live DVD-RAM, though.
I had that exact Netbook and it was awesome! Back when I was in college, I had my desktop running in my room and had the predecessor to OneDrive which was Microsoft Sync and it would allow you to sync files between two systems without having to push them to the cloud storage so I would take that netbook to class and type notes on it and then have them on my desktop when I would get back. Kind of a server-client setup but VPN-less because it was done by an agent on both systems. Mine came with XP as well, but I ultimately upgraded the hard drive in the netbook to a 32GB SSD and increased the RAM in it and got Windows 7 Home running on it and disabled windows aero on it and changed the theme to Windows 7 basic and it ran pretty well. Pretty cool seeing this one on your video and still running!
Ahh... those spinning sounds the optical drives do, brings me back good (and bad) memories!
Asus comes from Pegasus, so I guess it's supposed to sound like that word.
I spy some Red Alert 2 on that old netbook!
And RollerCoaster Tycoon!
NeroDriveSpeed, slow that mad drive down.
+zx8401ztv -- You beat me to it - Nero DriveSpeed would help correct this issue.
Robin Persaud, i used to have one of those mad 40+ drives years ago and it was really annoying when it was determined to go warp 9.
It damaged disks and wasted so much time.
DriveSpeed helped a lot.
Older slower drives often did the job better without all the messing around.
I have Nero I've never tried using during a burn disc ... my impression was that was for reading processes ... some functions of Nero locks the drive ... if memory serves me correctly burning is one that Nero locks the drive so programs such as drive speed can NOT influence the drive's speed ... I may be wrong though LOL I remember you can tell Nero at which speed you want to burn a disc (it depends on the drive itself as well)
As a teen and many years ago I allways wanted to boot my pc from a DVD-RAM Disc.
hehe, I do boot my PC from DVD-RAM sometimes :-)
@@mikeholbrough7723 With read write filesystem on disc?
@@Nibbleminx Yes. Using Ext2 format and isolinux - I have several full systems on dvd-ram for emulation - boot straight into linux running the emulator of my choice.
30:10 - "Haaaayyyyy! Removable device detected!" I think he got way more excited about that than is socially acceptable. lol jk On a side note, I love this long-play format. I for one vote to keep making them from time to time alongside your regular videos.
Speaking of excited...just how you want them to be. 28:24
The only downside of this channel is no subtitles :P I had to wait until I wasn't in a silent environment.
Great video!
If it weren't so long, I would have transcribed it. But... it's just so long...
@@TechnologyConnextras no need to worry about it. It just made me realize how happy I am with the perfect transcriptions on your main channel :)
Thank you for informing us about the DVD RAM, I always thought it was proprietary to Panasonic drives!
I found some of these DVD-RAM disks at my job in 2018(we have drawers full of old stuff). I put it in a DVD drive and it worked. I wrote some videos to it and it worked fine. When I tried to write a folder with a bunch of files the drive damn near caught fire. Thank God for USB flash drives.
I still have DVD-RAM's with various shows I recorded from the television years ago using a Panasonic recorder. I can play them back on my laptop using the built-in CD/DVD drive which also supports DVD-RAM and using the VLC media player app. If I wanted to copy a full DVD-RAM to the desktop of my computer, it would take about 25 minutes to transfer.
Wow! I never knew that there was a way to play DVD-RAM videos on a PC...
I guess this is yet another reason to love VLC.
I guess I haven't really looked into it for awhile... Just plain had given up...
I loved my Pana Recorder, it was way better than tape, since you could erase individual shows to make space for new ones...
Thank you so much for those valuable experiments. Testing on Linux would be very interesting to see.
I can't believe this didn't catch on, it truly works like a removable disk/disc.
I would name this channel as "Technology Connection Extra" instead of TC2
Atak Snajpera that would confuse the yanks though
@@MrBrandonVegas As a Yank I can deconfirm that. I perfectly understand the point of Ashen's Extra and Nostalgia Nerd's Extra channels.
Or maybe "Technology Connections - An extra bite"?
TC unscripted
Technology Connextras
I had an Acer Aspire One, except mine was blue. It was the only computer I had at that period in my life. Mine had a puny 1024x600 display, but I made it work, if you can believe it, and I wrote code on it all night, on that tiny little keyboard. This was back in 2009. Memories!
Also:it's nice to see and hear that a youtube is talking to a Person, and not to a zombie or a monkey. Feels conversationally, and not hypnotizing
I love the fourth wall breaking.
If you revisit this you should see how Linux fairs in the testing.
DVD-RAM works fine on Linux. In the past the UDF-Driver was not part of every mainstream distro (i.e. Slackware), but after compiling it, it worked fine.
Using other file systems (ext2, fat32, ...) worked out of the box, if I remember correctly.
Little correction: the filesystem driver is in the kernel, just the commandline tools have to be added to Slackware, but reading and writing UDF, fat32, ... works out of the box
Windows uses write-through caches by default on removable drives, whereas Linux uses the same kind of write-back caches as are used on fixed drives. As a result, Linux should be able to bunch together writes of more than one file without going to update the metadata after each single file, and as a result should be much faster. Just check that your distro doesn't use the sync mount option.
You could also try going to device manager and turning on write-back cache for the DVD drive on Windows. On Windows 8.1, this seems to be on the Policies tab in the device properties, at least for USB drives. I don't see it for my DVD drive, but I don't know if it supports DVD-RAM or if the tabs would change if I inserted a DVD-RAM disc.
The reason Windows does this is so people can remove their USB drives (and floppies etc.) without using the safe removal feature and still usually have their files intact. On a DVD drive software is in control of when the disc gets ejected, so there should be no reason to use write-through caches, but possibly Windows does not take this into account and just uses write-through caches on all removable drives.
Jamin, since ChromeOS is based on the Linux kernel it should have behave correctly as Torsten and Henri said. That's kinda weird that Alec couldn't write on with its Chromebook, maybe Google removed this part on kernel compilation to shrink its size.
@@PainterVierax I think the filesystem the recorder used might be read-only. Or maybe it's not even a real filesystem, but just a dvd-video?
Thanks for the great details. Would love to see more on your old process moving analog video to digital!
Journal file systems have to check the file after every right and then verify it and then write down its location on the boot record as a successful burn. It is faster to do it all at once but it means that if the burn is interrupted, then the disk doesn't have a record of the file and has to restart at the last boot record or journal entry.
Your video just reminded me that i have a DVD-RAM laying aroud somewhere. So I tried it after many years, still works. I was excited what i would find on it. Nah nothing special, just a trailer of Matrix Revolutions for some reason. I like just have one but i like the format, its a pretty shiny disc in a nice caddy.
Nice video btw!
35:24 The read graph suggests constant linear velocity as the read speed has plateaued, as opposed to the near linear increase at the start which suggests constant angular velocity as read speed and thus linear velocity is increasing.
The thing is, the drive itself doesn't have the context to know that it's only going to write a single sector at the spindle.
I suspect the desktop drives have stronger motors so they can spin up and down faster. That does require a lot more power which probably is a limitation on external drives. They may also have slightly smarter firmware that can be adjusting the spin rate while stepping which would reduce the delays too.
There is another factor that makes a big difference, though: caching. If the OS caches the file system metadata, then there is less seek time involved since that would reduce the writes to "track 0". Also, drive level caching can potentially do some reordering of physical writes so there would potentially need to be a lot fewer seeks (and associated speed changes) for physical writing.
I'm starting to like your TC2 vids more then your TC1 vids... IDK why love your work though on both channels!!
I LOVE the longer videos
I am still using an optical drive, mainly a blu-ray reader since i love watching blu-ray movies, good picture quality and not to mention the DTS
There should definetly be a youtube award for the best title 😄
Thanks for another fun video. I dusted off my old DVD-RAM discs and did some poking around... I have a desktop ASUS drive that I love, except for DVD-RAMs apparently. Man, what an awful garbage fire. 1.5x erase, 0.7x erase. So much for 3x discs (verification, blah blah).
I loved these when they came out but they don't hold a candle to anything else. It's funny how tech slingshots then stagnates. Thanks again for the ramble.
I like your desktop wallpaper btw, nice video too!
All DVD/CDROM etc... use constant linear speed , that means that all of them change rotational speed depending on how far from the center they are to maintain a constant sector density. So, that speed-up/speed-down when writting is totally normal and unavoidable on FAT32 because the main fat block is at 0.
That's the reason why there are other formats more appropiate for CD access. They usually have more index blocks scattered thru the disk, so the head doesn't have to move that much.
The Desktop drive is just using a better motor, and has more cache.
6:06 - most laser pickups doesn't like to operate with top (non-translucent) cover off! Some light from your studio lighting setup can go through the disk's plastic and overexpose the photodiode (matrix or receiver) of laser head. @ 9:00 you can see a laser dot which proves that the disk itself is translucent to at least red component of your studio light
“We’ll see if windows can figure it out, NOPE” 😂
Looks like I’m not the only one favoring having two optical drives in my desktop computer. I got two Asus BD drives installed, one of them was from a previous computer and the new one I bought especially for burning M-Disc media. I really like optical media, I treasure my Pioneer DVD DVR as it’s a great piece of conversion technology for transferring analogue video to the digital domain. I wish modern computers still had floppy interfaces on their motherboards but sadly the disappeared about 10 years ago. A good reason to keep some older PC’s around.
I wonder, does anyone remember the Nero InCD tool?
It allowed to format even regular CD-RW discs to UDF FS and then use them just like DVD-RAM (it was possible to write/delete files on the disc using any program, just like with flash drive. And it required a driver to read the disc (the driver for a CD disk!), which was burned to the CD itself and was the only data available on the disc w/o the driver)
Two years later: I used to do many tests with Nero InCD when I was a teenager, it was amazing but I needed InCD installed on all the computers I wanted que CD-RW to be read on. I just thought about it when I saw the UDF selection in the Windows format tool.
My guess is because the Bluray drive would have a much larger cache for buffering the larger files off of a bluray disc, so it would be able to cache larger chunks of data. That would allow it to reference the sector data less frequently.
I used to have the same or similar laptop of the Acer Aspire and as a kid i absolutely loved the crap out of it. Such a good laptop with a great keyboard.
One of the most interesting videos I've ever seen!
I've heard several different pronunciations of "ASUS", so I'm not sure which one is correct.
What I *DO* know is that the parent company is named 'Pegatron', and that both names were inspired by the Pegasus, a winged horse creature from old Greek legends.
A sister company to ASUS is As-Rock.
If I recall, I actually used to use a utility that could artificially cap the read/write speed of my drive for noise reasons. I wonder if that would actually help the slimdrive as a side effect.
8:26 Unplugging the drive usually solves that problem especially if it stops responding. Essentially it causes the operating system (windows in your case, linux mint in my case) to wait indefinitely until the drive reports back, which it never does. As soon as it's unplugged, it gives an error, and everything resumes.
I should say, GNU/Linux supports DVD-RAM out of the box.
and handles it a LOT better than Windows does!
I'd just like to interject for a moment... What you're referring to as ChromeOS is actually ChromeOS/GNU/Linux
(actually don't know how much of GNU is actually in ChromeOS but I couldn't resist)
Love this! I feel better now.....I have 3 PCs, 1 desktop, 2 laptops of varying ages ( not discussing the iPad and KindleFire), running various iterations of Windows, and I occasionally get them all up and running just for the sheer hell of seeing who can do what, and why. I just installed my scanner driver on all three, why not? Now I really want to get an external drive so I can load software on the drive less Windows 10 laptop....No, these drivers aren't on the web, at least for free... Photo editing software. Fun stuff to see other people doing these kinds of things, thanks!,, I should get maybe get out more, or some.
Some points about the video. First the back-and-forth can be a result of operating system's way of handling things. Operating systems keep journals in the file systems to recover from power loss in order to avoid power losses. This limits the number of files/bytes that has been written in a single write. So it might be the reason of going back and forth. File system scheduler of Windows is not the best of its kind. You can try MacOS or Linux (ChromeOS uses completely software stack so it's not considered a "regular" Linux).
But more importantly I think that the hardware buffers of optical drives play a bigger role here. They might be optimized for sequential reading since most of the variants are read that way. This also explains why Blu-Ray drive is much faster than DVD and doesn't go back-and-forth every so often. Since Blu-Ray discs has significantly more capacity and higher bitrates they need larger buffers. More buffer space means you can put many files to the buffer and schedule the writes in order to write sectors next to each other in a single run. However, the smaller buffer of DVD drives can only store a limited number of files which can cause many discrete writes.
Finally, I want to say I love your videos. You're covering the technologies that fascinated me back then when I was a computer geek teenager. I wish that I wasn't a broke student and could be your patron. Please accept my appreciation for keeping your videos going.
FAT does not have journal, but you still need to write were files are
same goes to UDF - just in case
Journals are a file system feature, not an operating system feature, and neither FAT nor UDF are journaling filesystems, so I doubt it's because of "how an operating system does things." FAT won't be journaled on Linux or Mac OS either because that's just not a feature of the file system. There's no generic "journal" an operating system uses for all filesystems, it's entirely based on the FS. It might have to do with Windows' I/O scheduler, but somehow I doubt it.
What do you mean by "completely software stack?" Ther kernel is still software... Do you mean something like it does everything in userspace? I don't think that's true... Linux is not a microkernel, a lot has to be done by the Linux kernel even in ChromeOS and Android...
DVD-RAM was used a lot in the commercial sector and briefly in home use however failed to catch on. I have a Hitachi DVD camcorder that used 2.5 inch minidisc that worked great when used by itself but remember having to use special software to convert or read the VOB files from it to store on hard drives. Now I can not find new DVD-RAM minidisc anywhere!. It will record to DVD-R minidisc up to 4.7 GB (30 minutes only and not enough for most movies) Also the ram minidisc had a special cartridge like container where you could not touch the disc surface because they are not easy to clean.
DVD-RAM was also my go to medium when work banned USB Flash drives...
Fortunately, DVD Multi Recorders were pretty much standard equipment at the time...
CD or DVD RW just didn't cut it, mostly due to the eventual need to "format" the disk to recover "erased" space.
I don't think I ever met anyone who actually knew what DVD-RAM was, they just seemed to think it was just another DVD RW format. They were shocked when I showed them how well they actually worked when compared to CD or DVD RW, yes it was slower than a flash drive, but when work bans them DVD-RAM was the best alternative...
I also have a DVD-RAM TV recorder(s), it was simply awesome, used quite a bit till the digital transition/HDTV...
Just learned today that I can actually access/play the video on my PC...
Now, where are those disks, and I wonder what kind of "treasure" is on them...
I really think that initially the cost of entry is what kept many people away from DVD-RAM, and by the time
DVD-RAM was "fully supported by many/most drives usb flash drives became larger and more affordable, and had the advantage of being able to go into a pocket or hang from a strap. And that pretty much spelled the end of DVD-RAM.
If the same technology could be used with Blu Ray, I think it would make for what I would think would be a great archive/backup medium... But at 100 to 128GB, it's a little small, when compared to the size of HDD's today (10 plus disks per TB seems a little much)... There also would be a need for a DVD Multi Recorder version/type of Blu Ray recorders to come out and become the "norm" to reduce the entry price down, and the media price would also need to be really reasonable. I would really love to have access to an reasonably priced easily reused Optical Drive/media, with a large storage capacity that I could use for backups and data archival... I guess that's my pipe dream....
Love this and other channel...
I had that same model netbook, the Acer Aspire One! Jeez, it ran everything I needed it to to back in 2009.
Put linux on that netbook and be ready for a surprise!
What linux would you recommend?
For the netbook Peppermint would be a good low-resource option. For the laptop with 4 gig of memory just about any distro would do. Linux Mint or Ubuntu would do just fine.
That's what I have set up on my KAV60 (might be the model he has). Linux Mint 19.1.
Biggest disadvntage is finding a browser that will run on it that still supports the Offline GoogleDocs extension (there still isn't a version for Firefox)
@@SenileOtaku Does it work with Chromium?
@@alexanderdaum8053 Yes.
Why the heck does this guy have such a good taste??? "DVD-RAMifications" Dam!
ooh! i do still love my netbook, assumingly running with an n270 :) "inspiron mini 10v" with xubuntu/linux. it's my holiday machine to fiddle around with photos i've taken or check social media or so. still a loveable item with a cpu benchmark of 269 :D i doubled the ram and replaced my hdd by an ssd. it took me three of these with different kinds of physical defects to make my own and another one for a friend of mine, a year ago, as a christmas present. both perfectly intact. third one a whole mess of broken parts. she loved mine on holidays we spent together, that's why :) how cool you still have a netbook running, too! :')
You used a netbook as a daily driver for 4 years?! Wild, but respect.
10:40 there were some second party firmware from Liggy and Dee for NEC/Sony/Optiarc drives to fix some over-speeding issues
26:50, It could be chunking/binning/? multiple blocks of data at a time and writing tracking(?) information later, after each superblock. Each block is either 512 or 4096 bytes according to UDF specs.. (likely 4096 for DVD-RAM)
one of the main reasons blocking dvd-ram was that you could use any file system with it, and that the "other" computer did support this files system out of the box unless it had the same operating system.
the drive speed issues are implementations of power management , and CAV and CLV modes
4:16 Not all DVD burners can do RAM, around 2003-2005 the only ones compatible with the format were some LG, Asus and Nec drives. at the end of 2005 it was near imposible to find a drive not capable of writing them, the same goes for DVD + (most HP drives did support them) and lightscribe as you pointed out on another video. your experience mostly comes from "newer" drives.
I did have the luck to work during 2005 on an electronics store that specialized on CD and DVD media (almost all our customers were bootleggers) so i had access to a lot of drive types and media.
@Technology Connections 2 You should check out the file copy utility TeraCopy. Would give you more information and more control over your transfers. Great job on this extra content! It's weird admitting that I like this overly complicated explanation. Cheers!
he is the kind of guy who replies to every notification, pop-up on computer.... thanking the computer.... r u canadian? nah... too nice to be Canadian.... what breed of human are you?
Great series of videos on this subject. Speaking of stupid firmware my friend had a btc brand drive that if it had problems reading a disc instead of waiting for it to slow down it would spin it to warp speed and then eject and launch the disc across the room. And this was not a failed or weak laser but a known fault.
You can format drives in any Windows supported format thought diskpart, don't need XP for that. Just open diskpart (from the search or the cmd), type lis vol to list the volumes, sel vol X: to select the right volume and then for quick fs=FILESYTEM label=LABEL. You can type help from within the diskpart to learn more
Do not forget the difference in speed between a SATA drive and an USB one.
Since we talk about less than 10MB/s I'm not sure if the speed connection is relevant at this point. There was IDE (PATA) DVD burner back in the days and they performed at more than 3x
As others said, the cache on the drive seems to be the major bottleneck.
@degru5091 Many usb dvd drives require the power adapter or a second plug on the Y usb cable for two ports worth of power to burn, reading with 1 is fine. I have the asus one, also the full size usb 3.0 bluray external which is faster in every way and has its own power brick. Laptop style drives are just slow.
If you're nowhere near max bandwidth, all a SATA-USB interface does is add a bit of latency.
Technology Connections 2? but it's always been Technology Connextras!
Asus is pronounced like Pegasus. Don't ask me, it's a Japanese company and it's how they say it's supposed to be pronounced.
The failed write process is similarly riveting to the meltdown sequence from ‘Chernobyl’
At 9:40 , the fact that it measures its deleting speed in "Items/s" is very stupid, since different items have different sizes and different types of files take longer than others to be edited/ deleted...
Usually a filesystem only has to delete the pointer to a file for the file to count as 'deleted'. Fast and easy. That's probably why it's meaured in files/s instead of a bitrate speed.
Recovery software just scans for orphaned data and allows you to make a new pointer for it rather than doing any actual "restoration". 👋
@@Biaanca5036 thats a good point
hehe I found me some DVD-RAM disks at work in a cuboard that I remember seeing them in when we were clearing things out and I was confused on what they actually were for as well. This box was a pack of 5 and still sealed. Did some testing with them and I might be able to explain some things on the chrombook part of this. Since chromeOS is using what is pretty much linux I found that only the older UDF format of 2.01 is supported for writing. Everything after that is only supported for reading on that OS. After reformatting my test disk here with 2.01 I was able to use the disk pretty much like a flash drive in linux. Its just so odd to be able to write to optical media like this without having to need any type of burning software at all :) the drive just knows what to do. Let me know if you ever are in need of some new old stock disks and I would be happy to send you a couple from this box.
“What the beeswax” had me laughing way more than it should