Can you use DVD-writer as a "harddisk" and how reliable is that?!

[Dance123]

Hi,

Is it possible to use your DVD-writer as a "harddisk", meaning that it can write DVDs that can work similar like a harddisk (unlimited rewriting, editing, all the stuff a harddisk does) and how reliable is that cause isn't it so that you can only rewrite a DVD a 1000 times and then you would get starting errors. Then I don't think it's a good idea to use it as harddisk, am I right?!

Also, which technology do you use best for using your DVD-writer as harddisk. What are packet writing, Mt Rainier, Easywrite and what do you use best?!

How does that all work? I am mostly worried about reliability as I have always been told that DVD's can only be rewritten like a 1000 times which isn't like harddisks ofcourse which you can rewrite endlessly. Do you need DVD-RAM then, but that isn't really popular, so I was wondering if you can do all this reliable with DVDs or not?!

Thanks in advance for all usefull reactions!!

Mike.

 

[luco]

I can't speak from experience since I'm about to install my first DVD writer this week. However, from my research DVD-RAM format would be the best for storage, archiving, etc.

Still, why would you want to use DVD writer as a hard drive??
- It's a LOT slower than a hard drive
- if somehow Windows messes up while you're re-writing, your disk may be unusable
- you can only backup 4.7GB (a bit more with dual-layer)
- then there's the issue of media longetivity after numerous rewrites.

You can get a very nice HDD for $1/GB these days.

 

[BlueWeasel]

I don't know of any type of DVD packet writing software (that doesn't mean that it doesn't exist though).