Thanks for the info. CDR's are cheap; I think I'll avoid RW's. You've
got a colorful and fun way of explaining things -- have you thought
about writing and selling some techie guides for the novice computer
tweaker?
Lady Dungeness
Crabby, but Great Legs!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
On Sun, 12 Aug 2007 12:49:02 +0200, "cquirke (MVP Windows shell/user)"
<cquirkenews@nospam.mvps.org> wrote:
|On Sun, 05 Aug 2007 17:19:54 -0700,
LadyDungeness@Fish.Net wrote:
|
|>Hi CQuirke -- I always enjoy your posts; entertaining, informative,
|>and written so I can (usually) understand the techie stuff. I got
|>that Zip drive when they were the greatest thing since sliced bread.
|>It served its purpose, I guess.
|
|Thanks! Yes, IKWYM about the day of Zip drives; I too had an IOmega
|external, and sold a couple before switching to cheaper, faster and
|more reliable generic-brand internal Zip drives for clients who needed
|backups that were too big for diskettes, while CDRs were still costly.
|
|>Interesting about the suit against Iomega. There's a bazillion class
|>actions suits around, and a lot of them are opportunistic. But from
|>what you say, the company was playing the opportunistic game as well.
|>Play with fire ...
|
|Yep. It's the old "branding over content" game, and they're still
|playing it to date. I don't think there's anything unique they do
|anymore; all I see generally are small HDs in costly boxes.
|
|>CQuirke -- I replaced the Zip drive with a new DVD-RW, with the help
|>of posters on this forum. I'm really happy that the install was
|>successful, and am amazed at what a difference a 52x is from my old
|>4x. Don't knock the 4x though -- it's still working, too, and never
|>once failed me.
|
|DVD drives rock, it must be said. It can be a bit confusing figuring
|out R vs. RW and formal authoring vs. packet writing, but I'll try.
|
|Here's the executive summary:
|
| R RW
|
|Authored Fine Fine
|Packet-written Can't Sucks
|
|
|Now for the background details...
|
|
|R(ecordable) disks are like writing in ink - once you've written, you
|cannot erase, edit or overwrite.
|
|R(e)W(ritable) disks are like writing in pencil - you can rub out what
|you want to change, but what you write in there, has to fit between
|whatever else you have not rubbed out.
|
|
|The "authoring" process is like setting up a printing press; you first
|lay out the CD or DVD exactly as you want it, then you splat that onto
|the disk. You can fill the whole disk at once, like printing a book
|(single session), or you can fill the first part and leave the rest
|blank to add more stuff later, like a printed book that has blank
|pages where new stuff can be added (start a multisession).
|
|The "packet writing" process is what lets you pretend an RW disk is
|like a "big diskette". Material is written to disk in packets, and
|individual packets can be rubbed out and replaced with new packets,
|which pretty much mirrors the way magnetic disks are used. This
|method is obviously not applicable to R disks.
|
|RW disks can also be authored, but the rules stay the same; you either
|add extra sessions to a multi-session disk, or you erase the whole
|disk and author it all over again.
|
|
|When you overwrite a file in a packet-writing system, you do so by
|freeing up the packets containing the old file and write the new file
|into the same and/or other packets. The free space left over is
|increased by the size of the old file and reduced by the size of the
|new, rounded up to a whole number of packets.
|
|When you "overwrite" a file in a multisession (authored) disk, it is
|like crossing out the old material and writing new material
|underneath, as one is obliged to do when writing in ink. The free
|space drops faster, because the space of the old file cannot be
|reclaimed and re-used, and because each session has some file system
|overhead, no matter how small the content.
|
|
|There are a number of different standard disk formats, all of which
|must be formally authored; audio CDs, movie DVDs, CD-ROMs and DVD-ROMs
|of various flavors. In contrast, packet-written disk formats may be
|proprietary, and supported only by the software that created them.
|
|Nero and Easy CD Creator are examples of formal authoring tools, and
|several media players can also author various media and data formats.
|
|InCD and DirectCD are examples of packet-writing tools, which
|generally maintain a low profile in the SysTray, popping up only to
|format newly-discovered blank RW disks. The rest of the time, they
|work thier magic behind the scenes, so that Windows Explorer can
|appear to be able to use RW disks as "big diskettes".
|
|Windows has built-in writer support, but the way it works can embody
|the worst of both authoring and packet-writing models. I generally
|disable this support and use Nero instead.
|
|
|RW disks and flash drives share a bad characteristic; limited write
|life. In order to reduce write traffic to RW disks, packet writing
|software will hold back and accumulate writes, so these can be written
|back in one go just before the disk is ejected.
|
|What this means is that packet written disks often get barfed by bad
|exits, lockups, crashes, and forced disk ejects. Typically the disk
|will have no files on it, and no free space. When this happens, you
|can either erase the disk and author it, or format the disk for
|another go at packet writing. Erasing is faster, while formatting
|applies only to packet writing (it defines the packets).
|
|I have found that packet writing software has been a common cause of
|system instability (that often ironically corrupts packet-written
|disks). The unreliability, slow formatting, and poor portability
|across arbitrary systems have all led me to abandon packet writing in
|favor of formally authoring RW disks.
|
|
|
|>--------------- ---- --- -- - - - -
| "We have captured lightning and used
| it to teach sand how to think."
|>--------------- ---- --- -- - - - -