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By parsimo2010 2026-03-122:244 reply 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.
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.
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.
Fibre channel HBAs really cost peanuts. Because there's tons on the second hand market and the only ones who want them are enterprises who don't buy second hand shit without a support contract (they usually dump them when the support is up, that's why there's so many working ones on the market)
So I get €300 cards for €20, it's a joke. Really great though because they're really amazing for tying storage together and they can do point to point just fine. No switch needed.
The one drawback is the convoluted software chain around it, I used to work with SANs but if you don't it might require a little investigation :) The client side is pretty easy, the target side is harder (this is the part that is normally covered by a SAN).
But the biggest problem with LTO drives and home use for me is the terrible noise they make. If 3D printers sound like robots having sex, this is more like robots getting tortured.
By Fnoord 2026-03-132:52 I made a mistake in my post. I meant to say FC HBA or SAS HBA. I went with a SAS one which I use with a HBA, but the FC ones were cheaper (both FC LTO drives as well as FC HBAs) but would've still required a FC switch). I already got some fiber through my house though, so it'd have worked well. But I went with SAS which was considerably more expensive. 40 dB ain't fun, indeed. I put my LTO drive in the fuse box.
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.
By wolvoleo 2026-03-130:03 Actually 96-98% is not great but not terrible if you're employing some kind of parity scheme across multiple discs. It just means 1 in 20 (or 1 in 10 to be safe) extra discs in the mix.
I just checked using $ sudo smartctl -a /dev/nvme0n1
That's after about 2 years of use. I think SSDs can take quite the beating nowadays.Percentage Used: 2% Data Units Read: 7,173,143 [3.67 TB] Data Units Written: 22,666,414 [11.6 TB]By edward28 2026-03-134:42
4 years of gaming :P.Percentage Used: 13% Data Units Read: 686,519,123 [351 TB] Data Units Written: 358,581,477 [183 TB]By sigio 2026-03-1216:43 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 ;)
By cwillu 2026-03-1218:10 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]By wolvoleo 2026-03-130:07 They can yes but they do need to be powered at least once a year or they'll lose data too.
You write 3x more than you read? Seems like a strange access pattern. Maybe something is going haywire with logging?
By Sohcahtoa82 2026-03-1219:45 Could be a log ingestion server or surveillance camera recorder.
By TacticalCoder 2026-03-1220:40 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):
And after 11 years it's still going strong!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 uptimeNow 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.
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...
By parsimo2010 2026-03-131:03 Thanks, I read your article and my main reaction is that I'm saddened by the loss of data on those few unreadable discs. I hope it wasn't something you'll need to dig up in a few years.
By CamelCaseCondo 2026-03-128:371 reply 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.
By rkagerer 2026-03-129:35 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.
By krige 2026-03-126:54 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
So your data only survived in a lossy format, because MiniDisc, but it did survive, also because MiniDisc? The quintessential MiniDisc experience :)
By Fnoord 2026-03-1315:55 That's the thing. It wasn't me. Someone in the scene received it from original artist, and he put it on minidisc, this was end 90s. Those who appreciate the genre, love these hidden gems, but it is only available as lossy due to minidisc (and MP3). Back then, FLAC did not yet exist, but CD did. Regarding MP3, codecs (including LAME) improved a lot over the years. The overal quality of the LAME presets, nowadays (and this has been tge way for more tgan a decade), is good enough compared to lossless, something double blind tests confirm.
In this case, I believe you are right: I don't think the data would've survived without minidisc. But in other circumstances where the user did not know minidisc is lossy?
In the end, a lot of these hidden gems have been (re)released because lost tapes (and, I suppose, HDDs) were found which is neat.
By Tuna-Fish 2026-03-129:17 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.
By Dylan16807 2026-03-127:452 reply I guess the drives just cost too much and so zip won until flash drives took over.
By GiorgioG 2026-03-1214:36 People who still remember Zip drives! In college I did tech support for Iomega. It was an interesting time ;)
By actionfromafar 2026-03-1211:591 reply 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.
By officeplant 2026-03-1213:34 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.
By ChrisGreenHeur 2026-03-126:255 reply [flagged]
By blue_pants 2026-03-126:541 reply Epoxy and brushes?
Doesn't it use a special metal layer, and the laser high-heats the spots to make them amorphous (to write) and then low-heats them to crystallize (to erase)?
By fhdkweig 2026-03-1214:15 I think there was intended sarcasm/joke.
The DVD+RW actually used pencil and eraser technology instead. It was a surprisingly robust method.
By scientism 2026-03-1210:41 Then came DVD±RW which used the magic pen technology. Each time you write, it changed both the color of the disc and the data. Surprisingly enough if you did it long enough it ended in color/data corruption...
By awesomeMilou 2026-03-126:392 reply Won't the epoxy run out at some point?
By ChrisGreenHeur 2026-03-126:442 reply That's the amazing part, when making the holes the epoxy melts and drips down into the collection bucket that the brush uses
It comes years too late, but I finally understand the reliability problems I had with a DVD drive mounted on its side. If only I'd had your insight then, I could have taken the PC to a playground and burnt disks on the carousel.
By jagged-chisel 2026-03-1210:09 I wouldn’t have expected gravity to be a problem at these scales. Wouldn’t surface tension override here? Maybe I’m totally off base …
By afandian 2026-03-1210:32 The original solution involved a very thick disc which could then leveled and re-pitted. The problem was that the change in mass over time made it hard to calibrate the acceleration.
It also put a high radial load on the spindle whilst mounted sideways which led to run-out.
And flooding the area with radon (a heavy gas) helped the disc to float a bit, but had unexpected consequences...
By mgrandl 2026-03-126:43 I guess the holes are so microscopic, even one cubic centimeter would last for the lifetime of the device.
By bityard 2026-03-128:35 No, it's a joke
Or, you know, how the technology actually works: two different lasers and crystallization states.
By ChrisGreenHeur 2026-03-129:451 reply Sure, dvds work by magic crystals.
By sethammons 2026-03-1210:191 reply Next you're gonna tell me that applications run on text you can write by hand. Pffft. Ain't no way
By doublerabbit 2026-03-1210:38 LLM's are actually little elves from the DMT dimension. They got captured and compressed in to silicon cells that now been enslaved by the evil. If you ask a LLM they will tell you it's true.
By grepfru_it 2026-03-123:003 reply >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!
By dataflow 2026-03-128:03 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.
For a nuclear option, delete C:\windows\system32\wua* or move these files somewhere else.
By NoImmatureAdHom 2026-03-1217:28 The nuclear option is linux
By ocdtrekkie 2026-03-123:522 reply 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.)
By tom_ 2026-03-124:31 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.)
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.
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.)
By fc417fc802 2026-03-1213:191 reply > if you are stuck with such software
kvm-qemu, windows image, block network access to the windows update servers, problem solved?
By VorpalWay 2026-03-1217:43 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.
> 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.
By VorpalWay 2026-03-1217:47 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.
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.
By wolvoleo 2026-03-130:20 Yeah it still has some annoyances though. Still telemetry crap, still forced updates (you can turn them off with a GP just like on regular but still, I didn't expect it on LTSC). It even tries to get you to sign in with a Microsoft account. It's an improvement but not as I expected.
