Hi CQuirke -- I always enjoy your posts; entertaining, informative,
and written so I can (usually) understand the techie stuff. I got
that Zip drive when they were the greatest thing since sliced bread.
It served its purpose, I guess.
Thanks! Yes, IKWYM about the day of Zip drives; I too had an IOmega
external, and sold a couple before switching to cheaper, faster and
more reliable generic-brand internal Zip drives for clients who needed
backups that were too big for diskettes, while CDRs were still costly.
Interesting about the suit against Iomega. There's a bazillion class
actions suits around, and a lot of them are opportunistic. But from
what you say, the company was playing the opportunistic game as well.
Play with fire ...
Yep. It's the old "branding over content" game, and they're still
playing it to date. I don't think there's anything unique they do
anymore; all I see generally are small HDs in costly boxes.
CQuirke -- I replaced the Zip drive with a new DVD-RW, with the help
of posters on this forum. I'm really happy that the install was
successful, and am amazed at what a difference a 52x is from my old
4x. Don't knock the 4x though -- it's still working, too, and never
once failed me.
DVD drives rock, it must be said. It can be a bit confusing figuring
out R vs. RW and formal authoring vs. packet writing, but I'll try.
Here's the executive summary:
R RW
Authored Fine Fine
Packet-written Can't Sucks
Now for the background details...
R(ecordable) disks are like writing in ink - once you've written, you
cannot erase, edit or overwrite.
R(e)W(ritable) disks are like writing in pencil - you can rub out what
you want to change, but what you write in there, has to fit between
whatever else you have not rubbed out.
The "authoring" process is like setting up a printing press; you first
lay out the CD or DVD exactly as you want it, then you splat that onto
the disk. You can fill the whole disk at once, like printing a book
(single session), or you can fill the first part and leave the rest
blank to add more stuff later, like a printed book that has blank
pages where new stuff can be added (start a multisession).
The "packet writing" process is what lets you pretend an RW disk is
like a "big diskette". Material is written to disk in packets, and
individual packets can be rubbed out and replaced with new packets,
which pretty much mirrors the way magnetic disks are used. This
method is obviously not applicable to R disks.
RW disks can also be authored, but the rules stay the same; you either
add extra sessions to a multi-session disk, or you erase the whole
disk and author it all over again.
When you overwrite a file in a packet-writing system, you do so by
freeing up the packets containing the old file and write the new file
into the same and/or other packets. The free space left over is
increased by the size of the old file and reduced by the size of the
new, rounded up to a whole number of packets.
When you "overwrite" a file in a multisession (authored) disk, it is
like crossing out the old material and writing new material
underneath, as one is obliged to do when writing in ink. The free
space drops faster, because the space of the old file cannot be
reclaimed and re-used, and because each session has some file system
overhead, no matter how small the content.
There are a number of different standard disk formats, all of which
must be formally authored; audio CDs, movie DVDs, CD-ROMs and DVD-ROMs
of various flavors. In contrast, packet-written disk formats may be
proprietary, and supported only by the software that created them.
Nero and Easy CD Creator are examples of formal authoring tools, and
several media players can also author various media and data formats.
InCD and DirectCD are examples of packet-writing tools, which
generally maintain a low profile in the SysTray, popping up only to
format newly-discovered blank RW disks. The rest of the time, they
work thier magic behind the scenes, so that Windows Explorer can
appear to be able to use RW disks as "big diskettes".
Windows has built-in writer support, but the way it works can embody
the worst of both authoring and packet-writing models. I generally
disable this support and use Nero instead.
RW disks and flash drives share a bad characteristic; limited write
life. In order to reduce write traffic to RW disks, packet writing
software will hold back and accumulate writes, so these can be written
back in one go just before the disk is ejected.
What this means is that packet written disks often get barfed by bad
exits, lockups, crashes, and forced disk ejects. Typically the disk
will have no files on it, and no free space. When this happens, you
can either erase the disk and author it, or format the disk for
another go at packet writing. Erasing is faster, while formatting
applies only to packet writing (it defines the packets).
I have found that packet writing software has been a common cause of
system instability (that often ironically corrupts packet-written
disks). The unreliability, slow formatting, and poor portability
across arbitrary systems have all led me to abandon packet writing in
favor of formally authoring RW disks.
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"We have captured lightning and used
it to teach sand how to think."
