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

[Mark Weisler]

On Saturday 05 July 2008 20:30:26 David Fox wrote:
> 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.
Thanks, that's good to know about the DVDs.
>
> > * 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).
A term that I have learned for this from other Conspirators is "disk rot". 
Seems an appropriate term.

So it's good to hear that you too are having reasonably good luck using 
rewriteables.

-- 
Mark Weisler 
PGP: 0x68E462B6  http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part.
URL: <http://linuxmafia.com/pipermail/conspire/attachments/20080705/b9e93712/attachment.pgp>