DVD-RAM: The Disc that Behaved like a Flash Drive

Fun Fact: These disks work on Wii U for some reason, and you can burn digital games from the eShop on them and play them.

The market at end of the 90s start of 00 really was a flood with removable tech. Most if not all was based on what your friends, school or work used.

Actually, in 2023, optical media are making a comeback. For instance, a 100GB m-disc costs $10-20 per piece, but they are highly reliable for an extremely long time (hundreds of years), which neither hdds or flash are. So for moderate amounts of highly important data, it's actually very compelling.

Floppy Disc

I had CD-R, CD-RW and DVD-RW drives in my computers over various years and I still wasn't aware that DVD-RAM was available without the cartridge! I guess marketing of DVD-RAM was total failure at least here in Finland.

but like... that's not what ram is ...am I crazy? What's going on here?

Maybe nobody needed that much rw data anyway.
You either needed to transfer some small files, where floppy was enough, or you needed to burn something to last (family video, data backup,..) so the rewrite capability was not needed.
Seriously, I have never bought -rw, +rw, nor -ram .
For the application as dvr, these disks make sense, but we've got VHS so no need to buy anything new (even when we bought a new device because the old one died, the VHS casettes themselves were still ok... so we've got VHS-recorder + DVD player in one

And now we have USB flash drives: lightning fast, great capacity, but a security nightmare. There's always a trade-off, isn't there?

Great video that took me back in time. I still have 10 brand new and boxed Verbatim 3x DVD-RAMs, as well as at least two brand new burners: an LG GH22NS50 (2011) and an LG GH24NS90 (2012).
Not to mention all the other partially used DVD-RAMs and burners from the early 2000s...

I used the tdk cartridge stlye, 9.4gs for years

Is this the same as DVD RW?

As many of us already know, iomega zip disk actually was really horrible. The fact that it physically touched the disk, that the disc could be easily damaged, that a damaged disc damaged any drive you put it in, and then that drive damaged any disk you put in it meant every college computer lab in the land had a giant stack of dead drives and sad students. And they don't last all on their own.
Also, as one pedant to another, etc etc is etcetera etceteram, "and other things and other people"

I really like that game developers of the past were limited by dvd storage space. Now you can do anything you want, but that gigantic games doesn't warm my heart.

I can understand why manufacturers preferred users to burn a whole disc at once.

Wow, I feel cheated now. All these years, only today did I even bother to find out that my old Plextor burner in my dinosaur computer actually supports DVD-RAM (and at 12x write, no less!) I could have been using that crap for like....15+ years!? It would have been so much better than all of my futzing with DVD+RW and all of that awful nonsense.. 😔
I guess hindsight really is 20/20...or at least 4.7/12!
😂

Ok! Its 2005, I was just born.

I miss my trusty floppy diskettes. DVD-RAM would have been a great format to get into, had the players been less expensive and more compatible. Chibi sized CD or DVD were really really cute, and any CD or DVD could be made in those. Flash memories, not so much :P

About the DVD camcorder. I used to own a portable DVD player, and you really notice that it doesn't want to be tilted. Because of the fast rotation. Tilting increases vibrations, and also tugs at the bearings. Were they that durable, that you could tilt it all the time? I don't know. And even if - it is probably strange to use a camcorder that resists tilting all the time.

DVD-RAM will be useful in the long run for encryption through obsolescent.

i have one dvd ram disk that I use to setup old system that can't USB boot, otherwise it has a copy of memtest86 on it. I love that disk as it is super useful

Why wasn't it more popular? Most computers were marketed and sold for home video cameras and video editing. Big video files are what faster speeds are for with DVD-r -rw. DVD-ram was a computer disc for backing up computer files. It Would be the best format for backing up MP3 files and photos and still is really. Nothing really obsolete about it. You don't need a fast drive for backing up small files like that. Far better than USB sticks.

verbatim discontinued them as well RIP

just wait until we get dvd-dvd and dvd+cd

I just got some DVDRAM this week. This is fun I never got to use dvdram as a kid :)

Some things I learned the hard way over the last two days:

- If your DVDRAM has a bad scratch, It'll pretend to spin forever and hold your entire computer hostage until you emergency reset(CTRL-power from Ct+Al+Del menu.)
(luckily my DVDRAM was double-sided, the side-B works perfectly)

- 8cm Type 6 double-sided miniDVDRAM is indeed a speedy little thing! :D

- My 19 year old Win98 laptop can read the Type 6 miniDVDRAM even though it has no DVDburn capabilities. It can only burn CDs but can only read DVDs. It can read DVDRAM regardless which is nice. (Using Nero inCD gives you UDF 2.01 write capability on WinXP. That's how I'm using it on such old systems). The point is, if you have DVDRAM: maybe you can abuse this in some way.
So yeah, it would seem that "normal" PCDVD drives can read DVDRAM just fine. At least mine can.

- Nero inCD version 4+ works with a modern present day LG-Hitachi USB DVD SuperMulti drive(it's a generic HL DT ST drive in windows) :)

- Apparently the bigger older Type 1 is not compatible with modern dvd drives. (I was warned of this) My Type 1 refused to format on any computer I've tried it with. Oh well. Back into the cartridge it goes.

- Windows can still map autoplay functions to INF files running off of a disc drive. So **Unlike a USB flashdrive**, you can actually use a DVDRAM to rapidly prototype your own autorun INF files if you regularly burn data discs and want to speed up indexing. I've already started using my new ram disc to make custom INF files for the H266 mp4 DVDs I've been burning. But I can easily see how I can take full advantage of INF files to give data disc backups cool right-click functions 🙏

Why the f is google showing me horror movie ads at night 😠😡

Many DVD RAM was used in recording 911 calls back in the day. They were housed in a cartridge case. The evolution of the E911 facilitated this recording medium. Usually, three to five of these cartridges would be loaded at one time. These would be swapped out daily and then stored for retrieval. Short-lived when the digital age came about and replaced these DVD-RAM disks.

thank you for your video. I happen to be one of those people that heavily invested in DVD-RAM. I have a stand-alone DVR that uses Ram discs and a DVD camcorder that also uses the smaller RAM discs. I have been very protective of my devices and until today had no problem. Today my DVR would not turn on. I bought it in 2008 so I have gotten a lot of use out of it. Yes I can still connect my video camera directly to other video recording/editing/watching devices, but it will not accept the larger disks where I have stored some of my valuable home movies. So what do I do now? My home videos are stored in a VOR format that I can't seem to be able to read on any of my computer equipment

Beta cam is basically Beta max.

Technology both peaks & faces extinction in an instant.
CD’s & DVD’s were totally ubiquitous until ~2013 or so..& then almost in an instant new laptops stopped even supplying an optical drive & that was the end of it..just like that.
Tbh I used both floppy disks & CD-RW/DVD-RW till ~ 2005-2006 & then suddenly their usage dropped out of existence for me once I got a 8GB Transcend USB flash drive ..

my other laptop has a DVD Ram drive

WHY THE HELL YOU HAVE 20 FUCKING PARTITIONS ON THE BOOT DRIVE?!?!?!?!?!?!

Not true, optical media is still used to store important files its better to have a hard copy of something,

I used to have these 700mb discs that I always used as removable drives. I had roms, emulators, torrented shows, you name it! I had a whole case of those discs

Do one on M-disk pls.

I didn't know what DVD RAM was until recently. I thought maybe it was like a floppy disk to store data. I didn't know how useful they actually were. I am used to regular DVD's. And using DVD's and CD's to save data from a computer.

DVD-Ram was totaly common here in germany .... people mostly used the for photos

We regularly deployed DVD-RAM to clients for backups, and for archival.

At least in Greece, where I come from, by 2001 an average pc (that's my first pc) would hardly play a sound file, let alone video. An average hard drive was two to four gb but who had music and video collections back then. I had a few floppy discs for doc files but that's about the average consumer needed back then. By 2003 we had at least 80gb of hard discs, mp3 collections, CD-R that went for 0.10c (euro) each and dvd-r for 0.15 each (the really cheap ones). By 2006 I first saw the use of having a flash drive (which where around for some time already) and got a 16gb one for backing up Pro Tools sessions for 60 GBP.
As I see it, the way things evolved back didn't leave much space for any DVD incarnation to make much sense as a storage medium (except for backup)

I think the $500 price for a drive was the main problem. It was easy to "sneaker net" files between computers with floppies (and later USB drives) because they were ubiquitous. But if I'm the only person on my block with an expensive DVD-RAM drive, it's primary use is for backup, making the random access ability largely irrelevant.

Has any1 tried making a RAID array with DvD-RAM drives and disks? 🤔

I uh, still use DVD and blu-ray, and format my DVD RW as flash drives.

So, another classic case of too little, too late..

parents had a dvd camcorder that used dvd-ram disks, and i was always confused by the weird stripes on them, and my parent's obsession with making me help them review them on the tv, then erase them instead of just getting new ones. but with this video, i've got a little more context, and just needing a dozen or so disks to import them to pc and make dvds, though i don't remember how we did so, makes a lot more sense now. Thanks!

I think the problem with DVD-RAM was that by the time it became affordable, USB flash drives were becoming available.

Lasers were a futurey thing once, wtf happened

Still use optical media today. Optical isn't dead, it's just obsolete. Doesn't mean it's not functional or useful, just means there are better options out there. Please forgive me if i like my laserdisks and DVD's.

I was also thinking they'd be great for recording! My dad had so many camcorders over the years, but I don't remember what they took. It also sounds like it would be great for installing new operating systems on. I'd be curious to see if I could put Linux Light on it and get it to run on an old Mac. I can't install a remotely current OS on a 2008 Mac my dad let me play with unless I spend almost $200 on RAM. I don't know how it would compare to a flash drive