Maybe I've had more luck than most with UDF CD-RWs, or maybe I'm just more willing to put up with their limitations, but here's a point of view from the other side of the fence:
Mercutio said:
1. Disc incompatibility. CD-RWs don't work in an awfully high percentage of readers in the world.
I always assume that CD-RWs will only work in a CD-RW drive, and not in plain CD readers. Using this as my working assumption, I rarely have problems. CD-RW drives are in nearly 100% of all machines sold nowadays anyway. I think what we have here is a chicken and egg problem. If more people used CD-RWs, then the manufacturers would work harder to make them more compatible, but since they are infrequently used, it is not worth their while to make improvements.
2. Disc incompatibility. To read a data CD-RW in a PC, you have to have some kind of UDF reader installed. Annoyingly, the two most common readers (Ahead's and Roxio's) are both over 1.44MB. Combine those two things and kiss portability goodbye.
My INCD folder is only 1.2 MB. I don't know why the new version is so bloated at 3.54 MB.
In any case you can format standard floppies to 1.72MB if you need more space, and they are readable in Windows although you can't boot from them. The 2M format takes this even further to 1.88 MB. Ahead's web site does have a UDF reader that lets you read(but not write) UDF CDs in any standard CD reader that is capable of reading rewritable CD media, and it's only 708 KB. Unfortunately, I haven't seen a driver that let's me read UDF CD-RWs from the DOS prompt, which is kind of annoying. What we really need are to have the drives and the BIOS work together and natively recognize CD-RWs so that you can boot to a DOS prompt, type format G
or whatever letter your drive is), and then save data on the disk the normal way once it's formatted. In other words, exactly a giant floppy disk without drivers of any sort. I'm not sure if this is all in the Mt. Rainier specification, or if you will still need to boot into Windows to be able to use a CD-RW disk.
3. UDF formatting. OK, it's a lot better than it was, in terms of time, but you DID realized that you're losing 150MB of a 700MB disc in filesystem overhead, right? Most people don't, and don't understand why their 600MB files won't copy to the disc that says "700MB" right on the outside.
You mean you get less than 550 MB out of a 700 MB disk? I'm thinking that perhaps InCD doesn't bother reading the "official" disk capacity and formats
all disks as if they are 650 MB. Since I get 532 MB formatted capacity out of a disk that is officially 654 MB, you should get at least 570 MB out of a 700 MB disk. If not, then there's no point paying a premium for the higher capacity disks.
4. Difficulty in labeling. In theory, a CD-RW is going to be rewritten. Therefore, it's very difficult to come up with an acceptable nonpermanent label, and the result of that is a bunch of unlabeled discs that you might very well mistake for blank CD-Rs.
I've been using P-touch labels for this purpose from day one. They never fall off but are easily removed without damaging the disk.
Unfortunately, you're 100% correct about availability and cost. CompUSA used to have 50-disk bulk CD-RWs. In fact, I only paid $30 for one about two years ago. Now all they have are 5 or 10 packs that run at least $0.80 per disk. Granted, my disks are 2X and the newer ones are 4X and up, but for occasionally saving 5 or 10 MB of files every few days 2X is tolerable. Saving that much on floppies used to be painful, sort of like Chinese water torture.
Is it that hard to make a decent CD-RW?
It's that chicken and egg problem I mentioned earlier. Since not many people buy CD-RWs, there just isn't much incentive to improve them. What I think may turn the tide in favor of rewriteables are the billions of disks that will eventually wind up as landfill. While it makes perfect sense to put data that will never change on CD-Rs, it makes zero sense to use them for backups. This is precisely the niche that CD-RW shines in yet I hear of far too many people backing up on CD-R "because it's cheaper', and then "tossing the disks" when they make their next backup. Too many of these people are not aware that they can just burn CD-RWs in single or multisession if they don't care to use UDF software. While I'll agree UDF CD-RWs have their shortcomings, they are great for incremental backups. Also, once a disk starts to become unreliable when used in this way, it will still usually be just fine as a single or multisession disk for a couple of dozen more times.
Your post underscores that fact that as of nearly 2003 we still haven't found a viable floppy replacement, which is really what UDF is trying(but failing) to be. CD-RW won't work in this role, even with Mt. Rainier. Neither will DVD-RW or DVD+RW. The disks are just too big and unprotected for this role, period. The smaller 3" CD-RWs are cute but too expensive on a per MB basis to make any inroads here. Zip and LS-120(240) are thankfully on their way out finally. Both were like the inkjet printers of storage(cheap to buy but you spend a fortune in consumables-i.e. disks). M/O might be well suited to this role if the drives were cheaper. Something solid state about the size of a floppy that holds a few GB would also be great if it could sell for under $5/disk, but this is probably years off and it seems like all solid state media these days are proprietary formats, which is a hindrance to widespread use. About the best idea I've seen were the LS-240 drives that could format standard floppies to 32 MB. What they should really do is make a drive that just deals with regular floppies and not pricey LS-240 disks so that they could get rid of the expensive laser. Just use regular servoing and you can still get 32 MB out of standard floppies(or read and write standard 1.44 MB disks), but hopefully the drive will sell for only $25, hook up to an IDE port, and be recognized by the BIOS as a bootable device. Since everyone has tons of unused floppies sitting around the media are essentially free. The very reason CD-R is so popular is because it is both compatible and the disks are dirt cheap, and this drive would have the same two characteristics. Not an ideal replacement, but better than all the pricey, proprietary formats that have been inflicted upon us over the years, and all those unused floppies will enjoy a second life rather than ending up as landfill.
I can't believe I just spent over an hour writing about CD-RWs.
