On Sat, 12 Jun 2004 07:31:07 -0700, Mike Kohary wrote:
Daniel Prince wrote:
Impmon wrote:

On Sat, 12 Jun 2004 01:06:04 GMT, Daniel Prince
wrote:

I am planing to buy a LG 4082B multi-drive mainly to back up my hard
drives. Do all brands of DVD-RAM media work well in this drive or
are there brands that I should avoid?

Why do you want DVD-RAM? It's not well supported and requires other
PC to have DVD-RAM drive to read them.

I have read that it is quite a bit more reliable that -RW or +RW.
Also it can be used as a regular drive (drag and drop etc.) without
packet writing software.

Just my opinion, but I think the poor support for the format more than
erases any supposed reliability benefits, and the drag-and-drop capability
is trivial. You'd surely be using at least a simple backup program anyway.
(And for that matter, you can drag-and-drop to DVD-R or DVD+R anyway.)

In 10 years, you will have much more trouble reading a DVD-RAM disc than you
would a more standard format. That's an important consideration for
archival backups.

From what I've read even though the DVD-RAM format is more robust, the
increased reliability is primarily due to the use of a cartridge and the
guarantee for a bare disc is similar to +/-RW (1000 rewrites compared to
100,000 rewrites in a cartridge). Being able to read it in 10 years isn't
likely to be a problem since archival backups would typically be done on a
write-once medium and not on a rewritable. There aren't many proponents of
+/-RW for archival purposes.