Optical drive as another HDD?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Frank Martin
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Frank Martin

Flash drives are recognized as another HDD, as are cameras
and portable HDDs.

Why cannot I use a 4.6Gb DVD as a HDD too?

Please help, Frank
 
Frank Martin said:
Flash drives are recognized as another HDD, as are cameras and portable
HDDs.

Why cannot I use a 4.6Gb DVD as a HDD too?
Click to expand...

You need to format it for packet writing. You also need software that will
read and write to DVD disks - the native XP application will not.
 
Frank said:
Flash drives are recognized as another HDD, as are cameras
and portable HDDs.

Why cannot I use a 4.6Gb DVD as a HDD too?

Please help, Frank
Click to expand...

For starters, unless you have a DVD writer with a recordable DVD in it,
you can't write to the DVD drive, unlike all of the rest of the devices
you mention. What is it that you want to do?
 
Frank Martin said:
Flash drives are recognized as another HDD, as are cameras and portable
HDDs.

Why cannot I use a 4.6Gb DVD as a HDD too?

Please help, Frank
Click to expand...

Further to what other respondents said: Optical disks are slow and they have
a limited number of write-cycles. If you used them as hard disks then you
would wreck them in no time at all. Same thing as for flash drives: Each
write operation causes some damage which causes them to fail quickly if you
use them as hard disks.

Have you looked at the cost of a 200 GByte hard disk lately?
 
Lem said:
For starters, unless you have a DVD writer with a
recordable DVD in it, you can't write to the DVD drive,
unlike all of the rest of the devices you mention. What
is it that you want to do?



--
Lem

Apollo 11 - 40 years ago:
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/apollo/40th/index.html
Click to expand...


Thanks

My encryption software wants to use a HDD partition, and so
I thought I could use a DVD platter to store sensitive
material. It is more convenient to encrypt a whole
partition than to laboriously encrypt each file. The
optical DVDs are probably hardier than magnetic HDD drives
and can be secreted away better.
 
Frank Martin said:
Thanks

My encryption software wants to use a HDD partition, and so I thought I
could use a DVD platter to store sensitive material. It is more
convenient to encrypt a whole partition than to laboriously encrypt each
file. The optical DVDs are probably hardier than magnetic HDD drives and
can be secreted away better.
Click to expand...
No, magnetic drives are ever so much more reliable. DVDs are much easier to
ruin.
However, it is true that they are easier to hide. DVDs are so easy to hide
that I sometimes can't find the one that I want.
Jim
 
Thanks

My encryption software wants to use a HDD partition, and so
I thought I could use a DVD platter to store sensitive
material. It is more convenient to encrypt a whole
partition than to laboriously encrypt each file. The
optical DVDs are probably hardier than magnetic HDD drives
and can be secreted away better.
Click to expand...

There is another technology you can use, if you can still find it.
This gives you random access capability.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magneto-optical_drive

Paul
 
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