Comments by "James LaBarre" (@SenileOtaku) on "DVD-RAM: The Disc that Behaved like a Flash Drive" video.

  1. I still use optical media for a lot of things. You can buy a lot more DVD blanks for the price of a single flash drive, regardless of how cheap flash drives are gettiing. Especially if you are dealing in smaller "data sets", where anything more than a 4G flash drive is wasted space. Heck, I'd like it if I could get a car stereo taht could read data DVD-Rs (each one having MP3s of a single artist or music style at a decent resolution). Sure, can do that with flash drives, but again, more expensive per drive than disk, and likely much wasted space on the flash. DVD Camcorder? Yep, still have one of those too (although these days I tend to prefer using the MemoryStick storage it already has; more capacity, and I don't have to 'finalize' it in order to view the video) DVD-RAM disks were used in the 'Hardware Management Consoles' for pSeries and zSeries (mainframe) systems. An HMC is essentially a "PC" set up with software to manage partitioning, configuring, and updating those large systems, and the configurations could quickly become quite complex. In order to avoid having to reconstruct the profiles in case of failures, the HMC could back-up the profiles to DVD-RAM. I'm presuming the "ROM" vs writable DVD-ROM was so you'd be able to overwrite old profiles, so you wouldn't accidentally restore an old configuration. I ended up with some of the blank disks because our test lab never bothered using them, and more when we shut down a server floor. Actually have a PATA internal drive for the disks, as well as a USB external drive that happens to have DVD-RAM support. Now that you mention it, I should see if my DVD-Videorecorder can handle DVD-RAM disks. I'm using that recorder to transfer VHS tapes by simply dumping the entire tape to disk, which I can then poke through to extract whatever content I still want.
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