Unlike CDs and DVDs, recordable bluray hit the markets exactly when bluray video came out. Give it another year or so and I am sure that prices will drop significantly. The only thing I don't like about DVDs, and I am sure Bluray is the same, is it's actual capacity is not what is advertised. Single layer DVDs, are marketed as 4.7GB, but in reality only hold 4.4GB, same with dual layers, 8.5GB but actually hold 8.1GB.

I just recently tried to burn a dual layer full of dos games (8.04GB), and was told I didn't have enough space, since the total image was 8.1xxx beyond the capacity. :mad:

I don't why it is that DVDs and blurays essentially hold less than what is advertised. :scratch:

As for my dead seagate, it wasn't a firmware issue but purely hardware since out of nowhere I heard the worst possible noise while operating it. I didn't even bump the damn thing, just out of no-where a grinding noise that essentially gave me a really sick feeling afterward.

You are right any HD is subject to failure, and thats why I am trying to make copies of what I already have on it, but like I said I have hundreds of GB to backup.

Marketing reasons. It's to get people to buy what they think is 8.5 GB of storage (in the case of DL DVDs), but is really just over 8 GB.

Same thing with HDDs: 500 GB != 500 GiB*.

(* - "Gibibyte" sounds dumb to me. I write "GiB", but say "gigabyte". I mean 1024, even though I'm *technically* saying 1000. :rolleyes:)

True, I know it is done with HDs. In reality my external 1TB is only 0.934GB. I am still confused about DVDs and bluray though :scratch:

Hell even on CDs you can burn 700MB, actually even up to 704MB, yet on DVDs and bluray you can't burn the capacity as marketed. :scratch: I guess it may be because of the method used to record them or something. I even tried making a iso9660 only disc, no UDF or iso9660+UDF, not like it had any difference though.

I am actually curious though, does DVD-RAM even hold the advertised 4.7GB? Or is it also 4.4GB?

Here are the exact calculations for a DVD:

I just put a DVD-R into the drive that says 4.7 GB on the label.

The writable size is 2298496 sectors at 2048 bytes per sector. This means total bytes is 2298496 * 2048 = 4707319808 bytes.

4707319808 / (1000 * 1000) = 4707 MB / 1000 = 4.7 GB as one the label.

4707319808 / (1024 * 1024) = 4489 MiB / 1024 = 4.38 GiB as in the size you see on the computer.

Same goes for HDDs. They're a bunch of tricksters these manufacturing folk, the bigger the HDD gets, the more they skim off the actual size.

Even worse, Windows counts in units of 1024 but says "KB", "MB", or "GB" instead of "KiB", "MiB", or "GiB".