If you wonder how this witchcraft is achieved:
#dvdram disks are "hard sectored" more or less like older style hard disks and floppies were. This essentially turns the DVD-RAM disk into thousands of individually addressable "mini rewritable dvds"
The DVD drive can easily find the correct little bit of the disk to erase and overwrite.
This is how the disk can appear like any normal block device!
A really weird fact: DVD-RAM is predates DVD-RW or DVD+RW!
This is unnatural! But it works, really well!
Why didn't these catch on? They are a lot faster than floppies!
@anchal this could actually work with a #DVDRAM disc...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecH3OU0R4ls video via @TechConnectify
TBH, #DVDplusR is objectively garbage compared to #DVDminusR / #DVDR because DVD+R didn't run on most cheap #DVD-Players whereas DVD-R did.
Tho #DVDRAM was best...
We're really looking at the plusses and minuses of this whole ordeal...Links to referenced videos are down here, too! So I don't wanna hear any complaints ab...
Two years ago, I was pulling out the few remaining wisps of hair I had - respooling tape, fixing kit, swearing - a lot.
Lining up the next round now… must be bonkers
#ReelToReel
#RCASoundTapeCartridge
#DCC
#8Track
#Elcaset
#DVDRAM
#CD
#DTRS
#CraftTape
#MicroSD
#SonyNT
#Betamax
#ADAT
#Cassette
#REVDisk
#DAT
#MiniDisc
#ZIPDisk
#MicroCassette
#Vinyl
I hope that @Archie8 is suitably envious.
There's a good episode of #TechnologyConnections about those.
How do you use DVD-RAM with UDF file system to backup file based data? In all our experiments, updating the TOC makes the head move for each single file, so the overall performance is in the range of 30 KB/s - abysmal, and putting much wear on the drive.
Our workaround is not to write individual files onto the media, but a tarball containing the files. Giving us more like 550 KB/s – still too slow.
Tried different drives to no avail. Any hints?
^g
HP van Braam
Kevin Karhan 
AVAV Systems
JdeBP
Regionales Retro-Rechenzentrum