DVD filesystems & capacity

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Tue, Mar 02, 2004 at 01:06:14PM -0500, Byron Sonne wrote:
> I hear numbers tossed around all the time such as '4.7 GB' for the 
> amount of space a DVD can hold.

4.5GB.  If you believe an 80GB HD can hold 80GB of data, then you will
also believe a 4.7GB DVD can hold 4.7GB. :)

> I hope to get a DVD burning drive soon (Pioneer A06U) primarily for the 
> purposes of archiving data *and* keeping it easily accessible. Mostly 
> small graphics files and longer video clips, but there will also be code 
> snippets, tgz, etc.

As far as I can tell from my reading of things, the Plextor 708A is the
fastest most compatible you can currently get (you can even update
firmware under linux with a plextor).  The pioneer is close to as fast
and still very good.  Plextor knows optical drives, pioneer knows DVD.
No doubt about it.

> I'd like to ask those of you who burn DVDs under linux what your 
> experience with effective DVD capacity has been. I would like to keep 
> doing it with the standard mkisofs & cdrecord pairing of utils, with 
> appropriate compensations made for the difference in medium.

You need cdrecord-prodvd (not "free") or dvdrtools (growisofs
specifically) (which is "free").  They do things differently but end up
with about the same result either way.  Both support both +rw and -rw
media.

The pioneer does slightly faster DVD-R burning, while the plextor does
slightly faster DVD+R burning.  Well for the pioneer A06 at least.  I
think the A07 is maybe faster than the plextor for both.  At least in
theory.

708A is an 8x DVD+R, 4x DVD+RW and DVD-R and 2x DVD-RW.  CD speed is 40
read write and 24 rewrite.

The pioneer A07/107 (the 106 is about half the speed) does 8x DVD+R
DVD-R, 4x DVD+RW DVD-RW.  CD speed is 40 read, 24 write and rewrite.

Both should have excellent support with both cdrecord-prodvd and
growisofs (dvd+rw-tools).

Lennart Sorensen
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