From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
From: geoff@collyer.net
To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu
Subject: Re: [9fans] [reminder] pointer to Plan 9 FAQ
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Date: Thu, 20 Sep 2001 01:49:22 -0700
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I have no experience with new or cheap CD writers.  It seems that
nobody is making pure CD-R drives any more; they're all CD-RW drives
that also write CD-R, depending upon the media used.

I'd check www.hardwareguys.com/picks/optical.html and the
corresponding chapter of their O'Reilly book for theory of operation.
The media seem to be a much bigger issue than the drives, so don't buy
Brand X media.  (I finally tracked down some Kodak Gold Ultima CD-R
blanks!)  Also make sure that your blanks are suitable for the speed
of writer you have (the media packaging should say what speeds it's
meant for).  The alchemy of CD blanks is truly strange.

CDs are really too small for backing up even just portions of modern
disks.  Once the prices drop some more, DVD-RAM looks attractive at
9.something GB per disk.  Among other properties, one doesn't have to
stage an image of an entire side and then blast it out as fast as
possible, but rather can read and write sectors randomly, just like a
real disk.  I think they only guarantee 100,000 writes per sector, so
using a DVD-RAM disk as a live read/write filesystem might not work
well.  On the other hand, for backup, DVD-RAM doesn't have the
write-once property of CD-R, so arguably doesn't make as safe a
backup.  But maybe DVD-RAM drives will in time also be able to write
DVD-R media.  (The alphabet soup of competing DVD standards [read
``royalties''] is only getting worse, but now that there are
implementations of some standards on the market, presumably it will
start to shake out.)