[conspire] Advisability of CD-RW or DVD-RW for Distros, Installations?

[David Fox]

On Sat, Jul 5, 2008 at 8:01 PM, Mark Weisler
<mark at weisler-saratoga-ca.us> wrote:
> I wonder what you all think of using rewritable CDs and DVDs for burning
> distros and installing from them.

Some of the time, they work rather well. It really depends on the
media you have, how much you can get out of it before you end up with
a disk that has lots of read errors and thus has to be redone, or even
tossed out.

I know I have used cdrw many times - I have a set of 4x Fuji media
that seems ot be able to do many read-write cycles before any sign of
badness on the disk. They're only 650 meg disks, so they aren't all
that suitable for many of the modern distro CDs that go 700= megs. And
I've used DVD-RW disks ( I have a few here - Memorex brand) that end
up being write-once media, for all intents and purposes.

For some distros (such as puppy) cdrw works well because the size of
the ISO isn't that much and you don't have to wait that long for the
image to burn.

> * they do take a while to erase and apparently a complete and thorough erase
> is necessary before writing again to the medium. (My experience is that
> the "fast erase", or whatever it is called, will often result in a faulty

Sometimes the quick erase is good enough. But a complete blank is
better. This doesn't apply to DVD RW media, since they can be
regenerated without any separate blanking session.


> * the rewriteables may have a shorter life, 25 years, than the others, rated
> at 30 years, but for  'scratch medium' that is just not a problem.

Well, based on my experience, many disks fail just on their own
(probably due to how they are stored).