In this video I’m gonna ask that you step back in time to the days when optical media
was still a thing everyone used.
Pretend it’s 2005 or something.
Great.
Your Motorola Razr is the envy of the neighborhood, PT Cruisers are still on showroom floors,
and your iPod--that’s just the bee’s knees.
So many songs in your pocket right now!
And it even plays video!
Ho boy is it a great time to be alive.
But you know what kinda sucks?
Even though you’ve got this awesome CD and DVD burner in your PC, it’s not exactly
the most convenient thing to use.
Every time you pop in a blank disc, Windows is all like
“What do you want to do with this disc?”
and now you have to make a decision.
Curse these choices!
I just want this to appear as a removable storage device like these new fangled thumb drive things.
Or even my trusty floppy diskette!
You can sort of use it like a flash drive, but it’s slow, requires formatting, and
is just a bunch of poopy nonsense.
But what if I were to tell you that there was a variant of DVD which actually was designed
to function as removable storage?
That my friends is DVD-RAM.
RAM????
That’s right, DVD Random Access Memory.
Just from a single glance of this disc, you’ll probably see there’s something a little…
different about the format.
Unlike your garden variety DVD-R, either dash or plus,
this disc doesn’t require special formatting,
files can be added to it or erased from it on the fly,
and aside from horridly slow read and write times compared to a
contemporary drug store flash drive, it behaves exactly
as if it were a 4.7 gigabyte USB storage device.
Perhaps the weirdest thing about DVD-RAM is when it was released.
It’s way earlier than you might think.
The first version of MacOS to support it natively was 8.6.
8.6!
DVD-RAM was first standardized in 1996, pretty much at the dawn of DVD itself, and
the first DVD-RAM discs and drives were available in 1998.
So why the heck didn’t it become, like, the gold standard of removable storage?
4.7 gigabytes of storage space in 1998 was akin to what many contemporary hard drives
had on board.
A rewritable disc, with completely random access, with that much storage capacity, seems
like some sort of miracle product for 1998.
And remember, this is DVD we’re talking about, so even 1X drives were way faster than
a floppy disk, and slightly faster than an Iomega Zip drive (with dozens of times the
storage space).
Before we answer that question, let’s look a little deeper into what makes DVD-RAM special,
and why it has these little dashes all over it.
DVD-RAM discs are structured as if they are a hard drive platter.
Or a floppy disk.
See, DVDs and CDs usually have their data written onto one continuous spiral of pits
and lands.
Think of it like a very long list of information, with little bits of code peppered in telling
the drive where along the list it’s reading.
This structure works great for things like audio and video data, but it begins to fall
apart when you want to store many, smaller files.
Every time you want to add files to a disc, a new session needs to be made with a new
table of contents written after the end of the first.
It’s essentially like creating an entirely new list of information, and tacking it onto
the old one.
And each time you do it you have to also say where the older sessions are on the disc.
And whenever you want to remove files, it becomes tricky to utilize that space again
(assuming we’re talking about a rewritable format) without erasing the entire disc.
That’s why Windows is asking you how you want to use the disc.
If you choose “like a flash drive” it will format it as a multi-session disc, and
it will do its best to present it to you as if it were a fully-featured removable drive.
But DVD-RAM discs aren’t like that at all.
Instead, the information on the disc is recorded in concentric rings.
Like a hard disk or floppy disk, data is encoded on physical tracks and sectors.
These little dashes are the boundaries between the hard sectors created at the time of the
disc’s manufacture.
These create a disc where each physical location has a defined value, and allows for formatting
the disc with any file system you like.
And that’s why they appear to Windows as a removable storage device.
Because they are!
The operating system can natively write to and read from this disc (assuming it supports
the file system) without any session writing nonsense.
Windows XP natively supported FAT32 formatted discs, and starting with Windows Vista, UDF
formatted discs were supported as well.
MacOS could format them as HFS and HFS+, too.
It really was an optical format that behaved as if it… weren’t an optical format.
DVD-RAM was very much the best of both worlds.
And keeping with the best-of-both-worlds theme, DVD-RAM discs were made with incredibly stable
phase-change alloys, meaning that the discs could withstand being re-written upwards of
100,000 times.
Plus they were very stable in storage, with an estimated life of 30 years or more.
And to allay concerns about disc damage, early versions were stored in caddies so the disc
was never actually touched by grimy little hands.
So then, why the fudge didn’t DVD-RAM become THE storage format of the 2000’s?
If you guessed price, you’re probably right.
But not so fast, there’s more to consider!
First, let’s acknowledge that this disc here is technically DVD-RAM Version 2.
The earliest discs were only 2.58 gigabytes in capacity, however double-sided cartridges
were common which could hold twice as much.
That’s 5.16 gigabytes for those playing at home.
And if you formatted these discs in the UDF format, they could be used as a single 5.16
gigabyte volume.
DVD-RAM v2 bumped capacity up to the standard 4.7 gigabytes of a single-layer DVD, and of
course double sided discs were still available which could hold twice as much.
That’s 9.4 gigabytes for those playing at home.
V2 also increased write speed to 2x.
And this disc is actually DVD-RAM v2 revision 1, which supported write speeds of 3x.
Fascinating.
DVD-RAM discs did get faster, with revision 6 supporting 16x speed, but from what I can
gather these discs are very rare, and along with a faster write speed came poorer longevity.
These 2-3x discs aren’t that old, I think I bought them in 2010 or 2011, but that was
by far the most common speed ever produced.
Also, the cartridges were largely dropped in favor of some magical extra hard coating
on the bottom of the discs, which to be honest seems to work pretty well considering I’ve
left this disc caseless in a junk box for who knows how long.
But let’s go back to 1998.
What were prices like for DVD-RAM?
Well, it’s not entirely clear, but according to the Handbook of Emerging Communications
Technologies, Creative Labs had a DVD-RAM drive available for $500, and a single-sided
2.58 gigabyte disc would run you $30.
A double sided disc went for $45.
Other drives and discs varied in price, but let’s stick with those price points for now.
So, in January of 1999, Iomega’s Zip drives cost just $100 for an internal drive, and
the disks themselves were as cheap as $10 each.
Assuming you bought 10 of them.
Obviously the barrier to entry is much much lower, but how does this compare in cost per
100 megabytes?
Let’s do the math.
A DVD-RAM drive with one double-sided cartridge would cost $545 and would net you 5.16 gigabytes
of storage space.
That works out to $10.56 per 100 megabytes.
Now, a 100 megabyte Zip disk costs $10, so it looks to be barely more expensive than
a Zip disk system, even accounting for the initial cost of the drive.
If you include the cost of the Zip drive, that same amount of storage costs slightly
more on Zip, with 52 disks plus a drive costing $11.90 per 100 megabytes.
Of course, this assumes you actually need 52 zip disks worth of storage space, but let’s
suppose you do.
As soon as you buy just one more DVD-RAM cartridge, the cost per 100 megabytes plummets to $5.71.
A DVD-RAM drive did cost 5 times as much as a Zip drive, but the media cost per unit of
data was less than a tenth that of Zip. 100 megabytes on Zip was $10.
100 megabytes of DVD-RAM works out to $0.87.
One of the crazier things about this to me is that DVD-RAM was cheaper per gigabyte than
a hard drive!
It took until the end of 2000 for hard disk drives to drop below $9 per gigabyte, when
DVD-RAM was available in 1998 at $8.70 per gigabyte.
And of course, the cost of DVD-RAM media dropped, too.
2000 was the year that 4.7 gigabyte discs appeared, and the drives stayed at the $500 mark.
The cost of these new discs in may of 2001 worked out to about $6.25 per gigabyte, and
it was only then that hard drives began to dip below that price point.
So then, and it seems like I’m asking this question a lot, why didn’t DVD-RAM become
the new super floppy?
It sure seems like it could have.
A gigantic removable storage medium, almost as big as your entire hard drive, which works
natively with your operating system with a true FAT32, HFS, or UDF file system, and was
actually cheaper per gigabyte than virtually any hard drive for some years, seems like
an absolutely tantalizing product.
Why wasn’t this, huge?
Well, there appear to be three answers.
Speed, compatibility, and simple confusion.
Let’s start with the first one.
Although a 1x DVD drive reads data at a blazing fast 1.5 megabytes per second, that wasn’t
blazing fast for long.
Sure, in 1998, it was amazing.
Not as fast as your hard drive, but way way faster than a floppy, and a bit faster than
a Zip disk.
However, part of DVD-RAM’s format specifications was data verification at the hardware level,
which was great for data integrity, but effectively halved the write speed to 750 kilobytes per
second because it double-checked everything it wrote.
It does appear, though, that with newer media and by disabling the verification function,
4 megabyte per second write speeds were possible.
That’s still not great, though, as a 32X compact disc burner can get to that speed.
Another big hurdle with DVD-RAM was that virtually no DVD players knew what the heck to do with them.
Much like CD-audio vs CD-ROM, DVD had this problem with distinguishing DVD-Video from
DVD-Data applications.
A lot of consumers just saw DVD and expected to be able to make DVD movies on any disc
with this logo, but they’d find that DVD-RAM discs just wouldn’t work with a DVD player.
This wasn’t necessarily a problem with the older cartridge-based discs because…
cartridges
(and it should be noted that the early cartridge based DVD-RAM drives could generally read
naked DVD-ROM and DVD-Video discs, too), but once the 4.7 gigabyte discs appeared without
a cartridge, suddenly the potential for missed expectations comes into play.
And this leads to the third problem: confusion.
Although DVD-RAM was among the first writable standards created under the DVD umbrella,
it shortly found itself competing with DVD-R, DVD+R, DVD-RW, and DVD+RW.
I’m not even going to get into the dash vs plus nonsense right now, but the significant
thing here is that all of these formats were compatible with a standard DVD player, with
some caveats.
So even though they didn’t work as well as a removable storage device on a PC, you
would get just as much storage capacity for things like data backups, and you could make
DVD movies with any of these disc formats to play on your TV.
Another plus is that these formats quickly fell in price, with a DVD-R disc running for less
than $10 in 2001.
Adding to the woes of DVD-RAM, all of those formats quickly shot up in speed, with 12X
and 16X write speeds becoming pretty normal for blank DVD media.
With DVD-RAM limited to 3X on a good day, its native file system compatibility advantages
came with a lot of speed downsides.
And of course, there’s a fourth problem I haven’t mentioned yet.
Flash memory.
While DVD-RAM and all its cousins were duking it out, flash media started to become a viable thing.
Yeah, it took until around 2005 or 2006 for USB flash drives to even become available
in sizes approaching that of DVDs, but it was way more convenient, and quickly became
available in larger-than-DVD storage volumes, anyway.
Plus it was generally faster than DVD-RAM, with 5 megabyte per second write speeds being
common in 2004.
So, DVD-RAM kinda just became an odd duck.
If you wanted a storage volume that you could just throw a bunch of arbitrary small files
onto, it probably didn’t need to be nearly this big.
A small flash drive was good enough.
And before that, 100 megabyte Zip disks were still plenty useful.
And if you needed to backup a large amount of data, a faster, cheaper DVD-R or RW would
probably be fine.
Really, CD-Rs were fine for most people.
Somewhat ironically, where DVD-RAM came to flourish was in set-top DVD recorders.
In fact, that’s why I have these.
Their nature as an agnostic storage volume with extremely versatile re-writability meant
that they were excellent for recording TV.
A DVD recorder with a DVD-RAM disc was essentially
a DVR with removable storage volumes of 4.7 gigabytes.
And since there was no need for speeds faster than 1x anyway, it was a perfect fit.
So even though DVD-RAM never worked with DVD players, DVD-recorders liked them best.
Kinda weird, but that’s how it panned out.
Of course this also kinda hurt DVD-RAM in the long run, because it likely stifled development
of faster discs.
Since their most prominent application didn’t even need 2x discs, there was little incentive
to market 4, 8, or 16 x media.
Had 16X DVD-RAM become common, perhaps they would have become the new floppy.
One area where I think DVD-RAM would have KILLED is in DVD camcorders.
Remember those?
Yeah, neither do I.
I kid, but 8 cm DVD-RAM discs were available, and I think that in
a camcorder they would have made a lot of sense.
Seeing how much better the set-top DVD recorder experience was with DVD-RAM vs any other DVD format
I’d think it would be a perfect marriage for a camcorder.
Easily delete individual clips.
Import them into your computer natively.
Etc, etc.
And if they came with software for burning full-size DVD-Rs of your clips, you could
just have a few DVD-RAM discs, and use them over and over and over again.
I’m pretty sure there are some DVD camcorders that work with DVD-RAM, but it doesn’t appear
to have been that common.
Most DVD multi drives made from the mid 2000’s onward can read and write to DVD-RAM discs,
so although they are hard to find (especially these days) they are still at least marginally useful.
If for nothing else, their incredible longevity may make them suitable for archiving data.
But I really think it’s a shame that they didn’t go very far.
An optical disc that behaves like a hard drive seemed to me a sort of holy grail, and when
I first learned about DVD-RAM, I was puzzled by its poor adoption.
But having made this video, it’s not exactly surprising.
Oh well, sometimes great ideas just don’t get traction.
Thanks for watching, and I hope you enjoyed this look into the life of DVD-RAM.
These guys definitely fall into my “that’s a shame” category of tech, but to be frank
we’re well past optical media for everyday data storage anyway.
When you can get a 4 terabyte portable hard drive for $100, buying 851 DVDs doesn’t
make a lotta sense.
I’ll be exploring some more details of the format, such as drive behavior when writing
to a disc, and comparing large vs small file transfers in a video on my second channel,
Technology Connections 2.
Clever name, I know.
You can check it out through the link in the description or through the card I hopefully
remembered to add.
As always, thank you to everyone who supports the channel through Patreon, especially the
fine folks that are scrolling up your screen.
With your generous support, Technology Connections has gone from side project to going concern,
and I’m ever so grateful for your pledges.
If you’d like to join these people in supporting the channel, check out the link below or you
can hang around for the button on the endscreen.
Thanks for your consideration, and I’ll see you next time!
♫ terrifyingly smooth jazz ♫
DVD-RAM discs were made with incredibly stable phase-change alloys, meaning that the discs
could be with…
[stares intensely with that face]
And this disc is actually DVD-RAM v2 reversion 1.
Reversion?
Revision.
If you choose “like a flash drive” it will format it as if it is a mul ple eh be
de pe ditchi de.
Eurrgh.
Came with a gle be blertche buh..
Most D…
Most DV… [laughs]
Most D… why am I laughing at the way I’m saying “most?”
A DVD-RAM drive with one double-sided cartridge would cost $545, and would net you five dollars…
five… pffffff eugh.