Continued:

Quite a few of the manufacturers today support all the formats and are definitely worth the slight premium they charge as you are assured that no matter what standard the disk is in, it will be readable on your drive and of course, you can write it in whichever format you choose.

The black sheep is the DVD-RAM format. Here the disc is actually housed in a protective cover (called caddie) and hence the entire package is a little bigger and different in terms of shape from what the usual DVD players/recorders are compatible with so you won’t be able to play anything you burn on a DVD-RAM on a conventional player.

The second drawback of the format is that DVD-RAM cannot perform any CD read/write functions and hence are quite useless for anything apart from reading/writing DVD-RAM format disks.

The benefit is that your computer detects it as a removable drive as well as a DVD writer, so you need not use a dedicated writing program to transfer files to the disk. Simply drag and drop will suffice.

This is possible because the disk is broken into 2kb blocks, so any read/write/modifying operations can be performed accurately with only the required data being added or deleted. Using disks of this format, you can normally write to the disk a 100,000 times (according to the DVD Forum)

A regular DVD-R/-RW and +R/+RW stores roughly 4.7 GB of data (DVD-5 standard) Both the RW discs can be used for 1,000 operations.

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