Tested: How Many Times Can a DVD±RW Be Rewritten? Methodology and Results

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.

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.

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.

>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!

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

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.

Very timely article! :)

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