[HN Gopher] Tested: How Many Times Can a DVD+-RW Be Rewritten? M...
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Tested: How Many Times Can a DVD+-RW Be Rewritten? Methodology and
Results
Author : giuliomagnifico
Score : 236 points
Date : 2026-03-08 11:44 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (goughlui.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (goughlui.com)
| parsimo2010 wrote:
| I love this and I love seeing that it's from 2026 and someone
| still took the time to do all this testing- it must have been
| seriously involved because even at 6x it takes a while to fill up
| a DVD, and then to repeat that hundreds of times on several discs
| would be an eternity.
|
| I haven't used a DVD+-RW in several years, as wireless file
| transfer over networks and flash drives handle pretty much all of
| my needs now, but I sure used the heck out of my DVD writer when
| I had it. I had no idea these discs could go hundreds of writes
| before failure, I always got paranoid about reliability and
| probably never went above 20 writes on a disc.
|
| Edit: at the end of the post the author says, "that's about 4020
| hours across two drives, 5248 burns and both drives are still
| seemingly operating just fine." What a colossal amount of time.
| rlv-dan wrote:
| I wrote an article in a similar vein some years ago that might
| interest you too:
|
| https://www.rlvision.com/blog/how-long-do-writable-cddvd-las...
| krige wrote:
| Ye, having experienced the "joys" of rewriteable CDs, I
| completely skipped the DVD RWs, expecting more of the same.
| Guess it wasn't, but then again, thumb drives became a thing.
| CamelCaseCondo wrote:
| From my personal experience, the article and the comments I
| read here they seriously undersold the reliability of
| rewriting. For any other RW medium (audio or video cassettes,
| even floppies) I remember ad campaigns by Sony, TDK, Philips,
| ... on tv. But not for these.
| rkagerer wrote:
| I feel in general the industry was more conservative making
| these kind of estimates than it is today. I assume they also
| benefited from years of CD-RW field experience honing the
| tech.
| avadodin wrote:
| I thought two-three times. Maybe a dozen. I always treated all
| kinds of writeable CD/DVDs as if they were one-write and done.
|
| To be honest, it hurts every time I write to an SSD drive --
| which is all of the time these days.
| Fnoord wrote:
| For archiving, DVD is 4 GB and who knows how long the medium
| will last.
|
| LTO-6 drives go for 300-500 EUR refurbished. You need a FC
| switch or HBA. Each tape holds 2+ TB uncompressed data.
|
| As for NVMe, if you do a lot of writes (e.g. DB's, Docker),
| go for enterprise. If you do that, grab one with PLP. You'd
| use it also as a cache for ZFS.
| sandos wrote:
| As overseeing backing up, from various optical media to
| disk, just don't use the optical stuff!
|
| This was a huge international conglomerate, doing CD
| backups for decades. Now it turns out these precious
| backups only worked 96-98% of the time. Terrible stuff.
| sva_ wrote:
| I just checked using $ sudo smartctl -a /dev/nvme0n1
| Percentage Used: 2% Data Units
| Read: 7,173,143 [3.67 TB] Data
| Units Written: 22,666,414 [11.6 TB]
|
| That's after about 2 years of use. I think SSDs can take
| quite the beating nowadays.
| sigio wrote:
| Percentage Used: 0% Data Units Read: 15,235,390 [7.80 TB]
| Data Units Written: 33,573,616 [17.1 TB] Host Read
| Commands: 107,051,408 Host Write Commands: 496,391,879
| Controller Busy Time: 455 Power Cycles: 938 Power On Hours:
| 13,189
|
| Not bad ;)
| booi wrote:
| You write 3x more than you read? Seems like a strange
| access pattern. Maybe something is going haywire with
| logging?
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| Could be a log ingestion server or surveillance camera
| recorder.
| cwillu wrote:
| 7 years of use :D Percentage Used:
| 3% Data Units Read: 77,182,320
| [39.5 TB] Data Units Written:
| 83,995,559 [43.0 TB]
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| The oldest NVMe SSD I have at home is a Samsung 950 Pro
| (the 256 GB version!) which I bought in late 2015 IIRC (and
| put on a ASUS Z170-A mobo, that already had a NVMe slot)
| and which has been in use that whole time (but mostly light
| desktop use): Percentage Used:
| 27% Data Units Read: 48,801,760
| [24.9 TB] Data Units Written:
| 84,590,914 [43.3 TB] Power Cycles:
| 228 <-- only 228 power cycles in 11 years, that's
| about 17 days uptime every time I think Power On
| Hours: 37,153 <-- not sure about
| this one, this comes out at about 9 hours / day of uptime
|
| And after 11 years it's still going strong!
|
| Now it's not on my main computer anymore: I'm rocking a WD-
| SN850X (recommended here on HN when it came out) but the
| old Samsung 950 Pro is on the desktop computer my wife uses
| daily (and she WFH).
|
| > I think SSDs can take quite the beating nowadays
|
| For regular use definitely. In my servers I've got ZFS in
| mirroring though: you never really know when a drive is
| going to RIP.
| bsder wrote:
| IIRC, the issue was never how often the DVD-R/W could be
| rewritten.
|
| The issue was the fact that everybody assumed that the DVD-R/W
| discs had roughly the same lifetime as actual DVDs and that
| turned out to be woefully incorrect.
| tjoff wrote:
| People did? I thought that was common knowledge, as it also was
| for CDs. Not only that, compatibility with players were much
| worse.
|
| Though there were times were RW discs cost as much as normal
| ones, and some friends of mine defaulted to buying RW even for
| stuff that was write once. I didn't get that, but for them the
| ability to, maybe, reuse the disc outweighed any reliability
| issues.
| hrmtst93837 wrote:
| The quality differences between DVD-RW brands and batches were
| huge, with some discs barely surviving ten rewrites while
| others managed many more. Exposure to heat or sunlight kills
| them quickly, even though they were not marketed as disposable.
| For real archival needs, options like M-DISC, tape, or cheap
| SSDs are more reliable than rewritable DVDs.
| tombert wrote:
| DVD-RWs always seemed like complete magic to me. I had no idea
| how they worked, or why they worked. I made and wiped DVD-RWs as
| a teenager dozens of times, because my dad got annoyed that I
| kept using up all his DVD-R's, so I bought like three DVD-RWs and
| used them for all my experiments.
|
| I don't think I got anywhere near the limits for any of them, as
| I don't remember getting any faults from them, but they were
| always cool to me.
|
| I was also one of the happy few who had a DVD-RAM drive for my
| desktop as a teenager; I never really understood why DVD-RAM
| never caught on, because it seemed to work fine for me, and it
| was kind of nice not having to wipe the disk to erase stuff.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| I guess the drives just cost too much and so zip won until
| flash drives took over.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| I saw zip adoption before CD-RW, flash drives much later. But
| maybe it depended on how much data you needed transferred.
| Early flash drives were much smaller than CD/DVD.
| officeplant wrote:
| I miss my first 128mb usb drive. Cost nearly $40 and
| survived a dozen wash cycles accidently left in my pocket
| all the time. Now days I've got 64gb drives that seem to
| shit the bed after a few rounds as a Live-USB linux
| environment. At least they only cost $15 or less.
| GiorgioG wrote:
| People who still remember Zip drives! In college I did tech
| support for Iomega. It was an interesting time ;)
| Tuna-Fish wrote:
| dvd-ram drives and media were always premium products, with the
| drives at least ~4x more expensive than the -r drives of the
| time, and the media was much worse than that.
|
| When -r disks bought in bulk cost ~20c each, $10 disks are a
| hard sell.
| lxgr wrote:
| They definitely are mysterious, but to me, magneto-optical
| media (such as MiniDiscs) take the cake.
|
| Written magnetically (while heated by a laser), read optically
| (by a much weaker laser), and somehow all of that fit into a
| pocketable player powered for 10+ hours by a single AA
| battery!?
|
| Unlike rewritable optical media, opto-magnetic storage also
| seems to have effectively unlimited rewrite cycles. It's a real
| shame they never became a popular data storage option, mainly
| due to Sony's paranoia stemming from also owning a huge music
| and film division.
| Fnoord wrote:
| Music-wise, lossy compression takes place via a proprietary
| codec (ATRAC). It isn't viable for data storage (neither was
| CDR(W)). Trust me, I had data loss due to all of these. Just
| use LTO with some parity data.
| lxgr wrote:
| Not sure I understand, are you saying that you were using
| MiniDiscs or other MO media and were experiencing bit rot?
|
| Making ATRAC the exclusive and mandatory codec for MiniDisc
| Audio was another typical unfortunate Sony move but in my
| view doesn't discredit the strengths of the physical
| storage medium.
| Fnoord wrote:
| Honestly, I wasn't being specific. I like a specific
| music genre, and within this music genre some unique
| content was saved to DAT and Minidisc. The DATs were
| lost, and so the only available medium has been based on
| Minidisc.
| lxgr wrote:
| So your data only survived in a lossy format, because
| MiniDisc, but it did survive, also because MiniDisc? The
| quintessential MiniDisc experience :)
| grepfru_it wrote:
| >Windows Updates
|
| If you want to stop windows updates, make your internet
| connection a metered connection. Updates will only be allowed on-
| demand.
|
| The more you know!
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| If you have a Pro edition license most things Windows does are
| a registry key away. The entire policy branch of the registry
| is designed to have configuration pushed down from the network
| like when and how to update, but you can also set all of those
| keys manually.
|
| (Also, no hacking is necessary to set up a Windows Pro install
| with a local account, just tell it you're going to domain join
| it.)
| avidiax wrote:
| One hint for the wary: Don't delay feature updates for the
| maximum allowed in the group policy editor. I couldn't figure
| out why I was getting forced reboots for updates despite
| other policies requiring it to ask permission. Turns out that
| if the update hits the group policy maximum, it forces an
| update immediately, other policies be damned.
|
| So set it to the max - 14 days if you want some time to apply
| updates at your leisure, and you are wary of non-critical
| updates.
| VorpalWay wrote:
| You could also use an OS that doesn't tend to have dodgy
| updates that brick your system, such as most Linux distro.
| Nor force you to update if you don't want to.
|
| Funny how a large company like Microsoft can't figure out
| QA, but volunteer Linux distros with much less resources
| can.
|
| (A lot of Windows specific software works in wine these
| days, Valve's investment into improving it for games have
| helped for applications too. Not everything, and if you are
| stuck with such software, yeah that sucks.)
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| > if you are stuck with such software
|
| kvm-qemu, windows image, block network access to the
| windows update servers, problem solved?
| VorpalWay wrote:
| I never managed to get Fusion 360 running reasonably on
| Linux, in the end I switched CAD software. It really
| needs some sort of reasonable OpenGL support (or maybe
| DirectX, I forget which it was). And it doesn't work
| under wine, it did at some point but then it stopped.
| Cloud connected software, so you can't just run an old
| version.
|
| Maybe if you had a second GPU and forwarded it to the VM?
| Not willing to spend that extra money, and it would only
| work on my desktop, not my laptop.
| parineum wrote:
| > You could also use an OS that doesn't tend to have
| dodgy updates that brick your system, such as most Linux
| distro.
|
| I haven't done it recently but back when I was learning
| Linux, I definitely bricked my fair share of
| installations updating and installing things.
|
| It was probably fixable to a more experienced person but
| it wasn't to me.
|
| Linux is a lot of things but brick-proof for novice users
| isn't one of them.
| VorpalWay wrote:
| It has gotten a lot better from what I can tell, though
| that is just based on what I see others struggle with (or
| not struggle with as may be the case).
|
| I can't judge this directly (I'm in way too deep, running
| Arch etc), I first started using Linux seriously in 2004,
| stopped using Windows except for gaming by 2006, and
| touched it less and less over the years. I have not used
| Windows 11 at all.
| rkagerer wrote:
| If you don't want feature updates, go Windows 11 IoT
| Enterprise LTSC. It's a comparative breath of fresh air and
| what Windows should have been all along. No ads, no new
| unwanted bloat shoved down your throat, no mandatory TPM,
| and pretty much the longest security patch commitment of
| anything out of Microsoft. It works great as a daily
| driver.
| tom_ wrote:
| The local account tip is a good one. I used it when setting
| up Windows 11 Pro on my desktop PC.
|
| Regarding updates: you might not even need to think about
| registry keys! I found these Windows 10 group policy settings
| to work well for many years:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18157968 - and I'm still
| using them with Windows 11, near enough, though it seems you
| now need to go to "Windows Update\Manage end user experience"
| to find the Configure Automatic Updates setting I mention.
|
| (I've also switched to using option 2 (Notify for download
| and auto install) rather than 3 (Auto download and notify for
| install), on the basis that it sounds safer, and I've had no
| problems from doing that. Not to say that I actually remember
| having any problems from letting Windows download the updates
| ahead of time! - but I'm comfortable living dangerously.)
| dataflow wrote:
| I'm pretty sure I read that at some point they started still
| allowing updates on metered connections, just slower or more
| critical or something.
| grishka wrote:
| For a nuclear option, delete C:\windows\system32\wua* or move
| these files somewhere else.
| NoImmatureAdHom wrote:
| The nuclear option is linux
| karlgkk wrote:
| I didn't know there was a rewritable dvd format. My dad had a
| bunch of dvds, I used to love sneaking one off to play on my
| computer when I was a kid, since he stopped noticing when he got
| into bluray
| giuliomagnifico wrote:
| Yes, they were present and not much expensive than standard
| ones. However, the issue was that they encountered
| problems/data loss after few rewrites.
| Sharlin wrote:
| Except that according TFA they can actually last thousands of
| rewrite cycles.
| giuliomagnifico wrote:
| Indeed, I posted it because my experience was different,
| perhaps due to my DVD writer or my settings. After 10- 15
| rewrites, I almost always encountered issues
| Sharlin wrote:
| There was actually only a short period of time when only write-
| once DVDs existed. By 2005 just about any computer DVD drive
| you could buy supported all combinations of {CD,DVD}+-{R,RW}
| that existed. Blank RW disks were, of course, more expensive
| than R's, though.
| primis wrote:
| DVD+-RW was super useful for passing around files in a period
| where flash drives were expensive. My high school photo
| journalism club used them a lot to pass around photos and
| documents, a couple days later they'd get ingested into the PC
| in the club room, erased, and put back on the pile for you to
| bring one home.
|
| I don't ever think I had one fail to write
| baCist wrote:
| Very timely article! :)
| zozbot234 wrote:
| DVD+-RW is old stuff, I want proper phase-change persistent
| memory. Bring back Intel Optane and hook it up to a modern, high-
| performance PCIe bus.
| userbinator wrote:
| The same site has an article on that:
| https://goughlui.com/2024/07/28/tech-flashback-intel-optane-...
|
| Retention issues are a bit worrying.
| rkagerer wrote:
| This is awesome, thanks.
|
| My understanding is Optane is still unbeaten today when it
| comes to latency. Has anyone examined its use as a
| workstation OS volume compared to leading SSD's?
| myself248 wrote:
| My kingdom for a MicroSD card with Optane inside.
| LargoLasskhyfv wrote:
| There may be hope for something like that happening,
| conceptually at least. Underlying technology is different,
| though:
|
| https://www.heise.de/en/news/Memory-chip-company-FMC-keeps-w...
|
| https://www.ferroelectric-memory.com/technology/
| haunter wrote:
| I wish there were dual layer RW discs. Afaik some were made but
| they never hit the consumer market in the end
| anal_reactor wrote:
| Really astounding dedication! And to be honest, I'm really
| surprised that DC Erase actually revived discs. Maybe the next
| step is to pick one disc, and keep using DC Erase, and see when
| it absolutely and totally fails?
|
| When I was a kid I read that you can format DVD-RW in a way that
| makes Windows see it as a normal filesystem. The next step was
| "can you install a video game onto a disc?" and the answer was
| "nope, you cannot, at least not Lego Star Wars".
|
| Also, there was a strange phenomenon that I'd love to see someone
| explain. I burned The Sims 2 onto CDs. The game worked. After
| some time the disc would fail at a file called voice1.package. I
| burned a second disc, which would again last some time, and then
| fail at the same exact file. I went through many discs, each one
| displaying the same behavior.
| htor wrote:
| I think what we are all really questioning about is: how many
| times can it be rewritten in Rust?
| Sharlin wrote:
| No, this is optical media, rewriting in rust only pertains to
| magnetic storage.
| compounding_it wrote:
| Would be interested to know if automating rewrites makes the disc
| run hotter which affects the disc lifetime physically as opposed
| to writing it and then removing it which cools it off (but may
| cause physical wear and tear from handling it). Does heat play a
| role in degradation or whether it's the opposite and helps it in
| some way.
| stavros wrote:
| Why did the author have to do all this hacking around with
| screenshots? Back in the day, you could query any window for its
| title/text/buttons and send events to the buttons directly. Is
| this not the case in Windows any more?
| gzread wrote:
| Apart from win32 itself, most frameworks (everything from Java
| Swing to Electron) just use the win32 API to draw pixels to the
| screen and don't integrate with the window hierarchy.
| bearjaws wrote:
| I used to work for a vendor who wrote the drivers for iTunes CD
| burning, I actually built a in house tool that could take
| multiple machines with 8 drives each and test our driver by
| burning to CD-R, DVD-R, DVD-RW, etc... and read the data back to
| ensure no regressions in our drivers.
|
| Reason for testing so many drives is that when it comes to the
| real world, a lot of drive manufacturers cut corners and didn't
| follow standards, so we had a growing list of "work arounds" that
| we would validate. Every manufacturer would send us their drives
| to validate, we had a huge closet with shelves floor to ceiling
| of different drives.
|
| Was a cool internship out of high school an forever thankful that
| I got it. Even if it's my most boomer skillset.
|
| Couple of main things that post are 100% correct, the brand of
| media does matter. We actually had specific media we would
| recommend to the DOD for maximum stability. Second of all faster
| media always performs worse for archival purposes, and burning
| faster will result in more errors as well.
|
| For testing we had a specific media for each type we found could
| be used for 25x tests reliably, but I don't remember the
| brands/type. We would basically load them once a year since we
| did a full verification every few weeks.
| cynicalsecurity wrote:
| Looks like a stale article from 2006.
| lxgr wrote:
| What a great analysis! 20 years ago, this would have saved me a
| lot of headache/anxiety and a moderate amount of pocket money :)
| xbar wrote:
| Thank you. Now I can rest easy knowing that my 500 stack of
| unused DVDRWs sitting in my cupboard that I got for so cheap at
| Fry's is going to last me the rest of my life.
| bluedino wrote:
| I always wanted to like DVD-RW and CD-RW. But I just couldn't.
|
| Cost. A couple dollars per disc, versus a couple pennies per disc
| for the one-time use.
|
| Easily scratched.
|
| They were slow. You could use a Syquest or Iomega 1GB drive, boot
| off it, etc. Basically as fast as a hard drive was.
|
| They were compatible until they weren't. Plenty of issues trying
| to read those things on other computers.
| einpoklum wrote:
| With USB drives today being large and popular, what are the main
| uses of DVD-R's and DVD-RW's, in your experience?
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(page generated 2026-03-12 23:01 UTC)