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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!
@hp
"DVD-RAM uses concentric tracks each divided into hard (factory originated) sectors, in contrast to traditional spiral recording found in other DVD and CD formats."
Which is why DVD-RW and DVD+RW became more popular. Other writable formats simulated a pressed disc with a spiral. I suspect most DVD-ROM drives could read DVD-RW or DVD+RW, but not DVD-RAM.
The last CD systems using a caddy might have been the Sony EB using mini-CDs, approximately 1991 to 2000. Early ones also took no caddy.
@raymaccarthy perhaps! But DVD-RAM came out so early that I think almost all PC drives could read them.
Very few stand alone players could read them, however, so I suppose that that could be a reason?
Were loads of people using dvd writers to make/copy video material?
@hp
I'm pretty sure most DVD drives couldn't read them as they are designed for CLV and a spiral. DVD-RAM uses tracks. It's organised more like an MO disk, except with a different mechanism to write.
Most Optical Disk TV Video recorders used DVD R or DVD RW (I've still one. my 2nd). Maybe some cameras used mini DVD-RAM.
I'm not sure I've even seen a DVD-RAM writer. I've even 2 lightscribe drives. I sold MO drives.
I think some Type II discs could be read in some DVD drives. Generally not.
No, this was the thing that made DVD-RW exciting: like CD-R, it worked in most readers. DVD-RAM didn't unless the drive was labelled and mine wasn't (and DVD readers were well over £100 then).
When they were introduced, the writers were really expensive. A CD-RW drive was around £120, I think DVD-RAM was about £600-2,000. A 1 GB hard disk was about £100 as well. They were competing with things like IoMega Jaz drives, where the disks were more expensive but the drives were much cheaper. The Jaz drives were smaller, but also much faster.
But I think the main reason for their market failure was the caddies. DVD-RAM disks originally came with caddies and the writers used them. You could pop them out and use them, but they seemed really dated (the really early CD-ROM drives used caddies as well). There were good reasons for them (reducing damage to the surfaces) and they weren't strictly necessary. Later DVD-RAM drives didn't use them.
But the prices didn't come down fast enough. When I got a DVD drive, my largest hard disk was 4.3 GB. A DVD-RAM disk was enough to back up the whole thing. But by the time they became affordable, my hard disk was 40 GB, so backups took a bunch of disks and DVD didn't seem as attractive (one of the reasons for the caddy was to make it easy to have dual-sided DVD-RAM disks, but DVD+RW had largely won by the time the drives were cheap).
I actually bought a BluRay writer and a stack of disks when I built my NAS, but the disks were 25 GB and NAS hard drives were 4 TB in total, so I never actually used them for backup (anyone want an unopened spindle of blank BluRays?).
@david_chisnall @raymaccarthy I do use blu-ray disks for backup even now! 😅
I use it as "cold storage" I have backups of all my Dreamcast games and such on blurays as iso, for instance.
I have loads of burnt media, every year I also write all of my tax stuff to an "archival grade" CD-ROM.
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