Tested: DVD±RW Endurance Round 2 – Part 3: DVD-RAM Comparison & A Dying Drive

Now, I know DVD-RAM is not a type of DVD±RW, but hear me out – I thought it was worth including in this round-up for a few reasons. The first is that it uses a phase-change recording layer, just a different formulation, meaning they share the same recording technique. The second is that my recent acquisition of DVD-RAM2 (12x) discs, I now own the lowest-endurance DVD-RAM type, often stated at 10,000 cycles rather than the 100,000 cycles of the former types. That, combined with its high rewriting speed, would make wearing out the disc potentially feasible. As a result, in parallel, I quietly assigned one of the drives to test the DVD-RAM2 in parallel. The set-up is basically the same, but in order to maximise speeds and replicate the way that DVD±RW discs are used, hardware defect management was disabled and the full area of the disc was simply written and read back sequentially in much the same way as an ordinary rewritable disc. Unfortunately, because of the way DVD-RAM works,…