To me, the problem is the high cost of the drives and media: 100€-150€ for a drive supported in Linux
If we talk about costs... it's a thorny issue.
I really don't like
Tray-Loading optical units, because I think that leaving an optical medium bare (like CD-ROMs and DVDs) is not smart due to the way the cases are made and the ease with which they allow the medium to become contaminated with dust and humidity
My DVD_RAM cartridges are sealed on 4 sides, and have a slide that opens only when the cartridge is inside the optical drive. While it's not perfect, this helps a lot in my opinion. In addition to the fact that the cartridges can integrate an RFID-EEPROM tube, which I find both bloody convenient and bloody ingenious!
-
I've spent at least ***7 years*** looking specifically for ***that*** DVD_RAM drive unit, and as much as I've looked for it I've never seen it on eBay and the like.
Many many years ago I had the opportunity to try it in a laboratory in Japan (as well as Laser-memory units ... with 5xCDROMs all in one single cartrige. Love this!) and it was love at first sight, I immediately liked it, in addition to the excellent review given to me by the owner, a friend who I respect very much.
So, when I finally found one in Osaka I was full of different emotions: Incredibly happy to finally be able to use one for my personal stuff but also disappointed at the amount of money and time I was going to invest in importing.
~600 euros, for both the 120 and 80mm units, plus qty=40 120mm-carriages (double side, 2x4.6GB) with an RFID and qty=12 80mm-carriages (single side, 1.45GB), including S/H and customs. All NOS!
Both types of cartridge are really very rare (especially the 80mm) and the 120mm with RFID costs about the 2x after import and customs, so much so that I would almost be tempted to try to buy common 120mm cartridges (even single side, 1x4.6 GB) on Amazon and modify them. In the end you just need to find a way - without breaking anything - to install a small RFID tube, which you can still buy on Aliexpress or on Amazon itself.
We will see
![Shocked :o](https://www.eevblog.com/forum/Smileys/default/shocked.gif)
Anyway, I have to thank a colleague who I met there when I visited Tokyo years ago and he contacted me via email to tell me that he had found some interesting things in the warehouse, news published by a local app that he was consulting.
Like for my Japanese PDA that you practically only find in Japan, or the education writing units (which we, "Europeans", call it "
distraction free, writing devices") that they only use in Japanese schools, it seems that this kind of thing is only used over there, where it costs much much less compared to their salaries. Blessed are the Japanese!
---
On the Kernel Linux side... it's a SCSI/50pin(SE) drive that doesn't create any problems with LUNs and has less "quirks" than most of CDROMs and DVD units. It falls into two categories:
- removable disk block device for the storage part
- char-device (there is a physical lvTTY 3.3v serial on the back) for the RFID part.
It's almost like it's a hard drive, but it's seen as /dev/sg with a large buffer (here, I hacked the kernel to have it), there's no problem with the partition scheme (I only use mac-parts), and there is no big problems with the filesystem.
However UDF/fs (mkudffs) is more suitable (I mean ... the media lives longer with UDF) for DVD-RAM because the number of times you can rewrite a DVD-RAM is limited to ~100K cycles, so if you delete and rewrite a file UDF tries to spread the writes equally over the media, while a filesystem like{ ext2, ext3, ext4, xfs, ...) does not.
So, it's also very kernel friendly.