Author: Peter Salisbury Date: To: Hampshire LUG Discussion List Subject: [Hampshire] DVD-RAM - is it really this bad?
Hi,
I've just bought an internal IDE DVD writer for burning off-computer
copies of backups. I got a couple of DVD-RAM disks because they are
more stable through time and allow far more RW cycles than DVD-RW.
But unless I'm missing something DVD-RAM really isn't much good for
what I want it for.
When transferring large files (for example one of my backup archives
is 1.1GB) I get an average transfer speed around 1MB/s which is
painfully slow.
The drive says it supports up to 12x (~16MB/s) and the media are rated
at 3x (~4MB/s). I have no trouble writing CD's at around 8MB/s so
it's not a limitation of the overall system.
On top of this, I only get 1MB/s with a udf file system on the DVD-RAM
and the Linux udf system won't handle a file over 1GB. When I put an
ext2 file system on the DVD-RAM the average transfer speed falls to
0.7MB/s.
Is it really this bad? Has anyone had a better experience of DVD-RAM?
