Hi,

Packet writing is where your CD or DVD drive gets a drive letter and you
can read/write files just like any other hard drive, thumb drive etc.

I've done extensive testing of UDF packet writing in Vista. It doesn't
require additional software such as Direct CD or InCD.

I've tested CD-RW and DVD-RAM from Windows 2000 (InCD) for Interop to
Vista and also going back the other way.

One thing to look out for, Vista will format to UDF 2.01, so if you want
R/W capability it's best to format all your CD-RW media to minimum 2.01,
the default for many years was UDF 1.5, DVD-RAM will usually be UDF 2.5
by default, so not an issue.

After a lot of testing, the DVD-RAM is the ultimate for RW packet
writing, a joy to use. It's pre-formatted so you can just take it out of
it's box and start writing straight away. Many new television PVR
recorders also support DVD-RAM.

If your burner doesn't have DVD-RAM, you bought the wrong burner, but
DVD-RW has almost the same capabilities for DVD packet writing.

Interestingly, they chose NOT to support MRW.

The drives I've used in these tests are Plextor PX750A. I've tested four
on four different computers, two with Win2k, two with Vista.

--
Gerry_uk

"Gerry_uk" <gerry666uk (AT) yahoo (DOT) com> wrote

Thanks Gerry. Your test results and report will prevent a lot of grief for
those interested in packet writing on W2K and Vista.

Jon wrote:
likely to lose that data than keep it. If you are trying to use this for
saving data, one day you will be in for an unwanted surprise.

Hi smh,

This is correct, no problems reading UDF 1.50, however I ran into some
problems trying to write to an InCD formatted UDF 1.50 CD-RW under
Vista. I found using 2.01 to be reliable. It's well worth the move to
2.01 anyway, some operations are faster.

I find for CD-RW, it works well on 2.01 (haven't tried 2.5), but I've
moved everything to DVD-RAM now, and it's certainly not slow or buggy.

--
Gerry_uk

smh wrote:

I'm currently using about 2Gb of programming and distro files on DVD-RAM
and have a synch program at both ends that only updates files that have
changed. It's only been in use for four months, so it's hard to say how
reliable it will be in three years. I'm certainly very pleased with it
so far.

--
Gerry_uk

Hi smh,

I think we'd need to test CD-RW again to be sure, but I did find certain
operations such as deleting a file much quicker after moving to UDF 2.01
on CD-RW, but as I say, I've pretty much decided to only use DVD-RW and
DVD-RAM now, so I probably won't get round to testing CD-RW. I'm
certainly happy with the speed and reliability (so far) with DVD media.

Yup, I had to buy some new ones. I managed to get some 3x DVD-RAM, but
in theory you can get 5x to use with Plextor PX750A.

Does it work at all, I mean don't you need MRW for that?

--
Gerry_uk

Hi smh,

I know about the "Non-Allocatable list" or what ever it's called, but
I've never had any problems with it. I just use the basic WinAPI calls.

One thing that's crazy with InCD is that if you use a synch program,
that synch program will have to "access" each file, in order to see if
it needs updated, BUT merely "accessing" the file causes the "last
accessed" date/time stamp to be updated! This causes a serious
performance problem. I wrote to Ahead about it, and got a reply
something like "we value you custom".

Under DirectCD, the Adaptec engineers had spotted this problem and their
software didn't try to change the "last accessed" date/time stamp, clever!

With InCD, sometimes just looking at a file, or hovering the mouse over
it, causes the drive to burst into activity and start writing, for
reasons explained above.

--
Gerry_uk

.. -------------------------------------------
how HUGE are your BALLS, Adrian Miller?
-------------------------------------------
Only a trashy company like Roxio or Adaptec
let loosed in Usenet this utter trash
-------------------------------------------
Deirdre Straughan (Roxio) is a LIAR
-----------------------------------
Mike Richter is a LIAR
----------------------

Gerry_uk wrote:
Whatever operation you are performing, you should not go by the accessed
time. You should go by the modified time. And don't understand how
changes in the accessed time affect "performance".

=====================
From: "Marc"
Date: 12/14/01
Subject: Wrong file dates

I recently backed up a lot of data from my P2 and P3
to CD-R discs using Roxio Direct CD.

Now I noticed that all my PCs indicate that the Created and
Modified dates of the files on the CD-R discs are the date
and time that they were burned

=====================
From: PasserBy
Date: 9/27/02
Subject: Copy file to CDRW: file date NOT preserved!

Copying a file to CDRW formatted using DirectCD, the file's
timestamp is lost. The file timestamp becomes that of the
copy operation.

=====================
From: Joe Pyles
Date: 2/28/03
Subject: Roxio ECDC 6

Someone help me here, is it true that nobody gives a **** that
Roxio can't get the timestamps right?

For over 2 years they have been saying
that they are going to fix it
=======================

Hi smh,

OK, that explains a lot!

This looks interesting, but it wants Flash plug-in, is there a text-only
version?

--
Gerry_uk

Hi smh,

The post from "Marc" is not related to what I'm talking about. He's
talking about when the files get burned with a time stamp that is the
time the file was written to disk, instead of the original time on the
source media.

I know, obviously I don't use this time-stamp. See below..

OK, here's how it works. Windows has at least two time stamps,
LastModified, LastAccessed. The only one we care about is LastModified
_but_ when ever you "look" at a file in Windows the LastAccessed stamp
gets updated to reflect the time you "last accessed" the file.

On a fixed disk volume, this is not an issue because it's very fast and
is cached anyway. On a CD-RW it's a problem. Let's say you insert your
packet writable CD-RW into a Windows computer and look at 400 photos
(e.g. using a Thumbs Viewer program), Every file read by the photo
viewing program will suddenly cause a WRITE operation on the CD-RW
drive, causing the laser to fire-up. Bad, bad, bad. You only performed
READ operations on the disk, but you ended up doing 400 write operations
and that's bad for performance (reading and writing at the same time).

--
Gerry_uk