The Long, Slow Demise of DVD-RAM
DVD-RAM, a rewritable optical storage medium introduced in the late 1990s, struggled for popularity due to high costs and competition from USB drives, leading to its decline by 2024.
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DVD-RAM, introduced in the late 1990s, was designed as a high-capacity, rewritable optical storage medium, offering up to 9.4 GB per disc. Despite its advantages, including data integrity and fast random access, DVD-RAM struggled to gain widespread adoption due to high initial costs and competition from cheaper alternatives like ZIP drives and, later, USB flash drives. While it found niche applications in Personal Video Recorders (PVRs) and some camcorders, the rise of USB drives, which offered greater convenience and lower costs, ultimately led to its decline. By 2024, DVD-RAM remains supported by many DVD drives, but its practicality is questioned due to slow write speeds and the availability of more efficient storage solutions. Users have reported mixed experiences with DVD-RAM drives, often citing firmware issues that hinder performance. Although some enthusiasts still appreciate DVD-RAM for its durability and long shelf life, the format is largely overshadowed by modern storage technologies.
- DVD-RAM was introduced as a high-capacity, rewritable optical medium but failed to achieve widespread popularity.
- High costs and competition from cheaper storage options like USB drives contributed to its decline.
- DVD-RAM found success in niche markets, particularly in PVRs, but struggled against write-once media and other formats.
- By 2024, DVD-RAM is still supported but faces performance issues and is often seen as impractical compared to modern alternatives.
- Enthusiasts value DVD-RAM for its durability and long shelf life, despite its diminished relevance in the current storage landscape.
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2 commentsThe few disks which were once written to directly without intermediary pktcdvd turned out to all have a broken UDF file system. And as i then learned the hard way, there still is no fsck.udf for Linux in 2024, a mere twenty years later. The udf-capable fsck of IllumOS/OmniOS[1] was unable to fix the file systems.
I ended up running photorec on these disks to salvage at least some of their content and finally refomatted them with the much more reliable and proven XFS. Probably won't use these disks anymore due for them being so incredibly slow on writing (more than 6(!) hours writing a 4GB sized file).
[1] https://src.illumos.org/source/xref/illumos-gate/usr/src/cmd...
Everybody always neglects to mention the predecessor format PD! The original DVD-RAM is “just” PD scaled up. 650MB× 4 = 2600MB https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase-change_Dual
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