Another CHF 0.02 from Switzerland:

The biggest drawback of DVD-RAM is that the disks are not readable in
standard DVD-ROM drives (let alone CD-ROM drives) which are built
into most computers currently sold! This still makes DVD-RAM very
suitable for backup and for short-term single-station archiving. But
if you want to have distributed archives (i.e. users taking their
data off the imaging station for processing and/or viewing on their
PCs), this means that every user has to have a DVD-RAM drive.

DVD-RAM, like CD-RW, is non-permanent and the durability is likely to
be much shorter than that of CD-R. Since the CD-R media are so cheap,
the inability to erase and re-use disks is not a big drawback, but
the inherent safety factor (can't delete files by accident) is a big
advantage.

>In our experience, the speed of DVDRAM drives is similar to CDROMS.
>However, there are a couple of important advantages; first and foremost,
>capacity. A single DVDRAM holds the same amount of data as 9 CDs, so now I
>can put the employee who made CDROMS back to work doing something useful;

You could also get a CD-feeder instead that hold 50/100/200/500
disks. I believe the per-megabyte media price is still very much in
favor of CD-Rs.

>The second major reason for using this technology is ease of use.  With many
>CD burners it is necessary to make a master image file which is then burnt
>onto the disk. With DVDRAM drives, you simply drag and drop the data onto
>the drive folder and wait... (a long time).

With the arrival of packet-writing in 1997 (I think practically every
CD-R drive sold during the last 12 months is capable of it),
drag-and-drop works just great with CD-R too. It also eliminates the
dreaded buffer underruns, so I can now have my CD-Rs burnt in the
background while I image on on the same machine.

Beat


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