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The issue was drop-in compatibility of a rewritable format with the existing DVD-ROM players. Rewritable media (such as magnetic hard disk drives or rewritable CDs) have edit gaps between sectors, to provide a buffer so that any timing inaccuracies in the write clock would not result in new data accidentally overwriting any of the other sectors.
CD-RW (Compact Disc-Rewritable) is a digital optical disc storage format introduced by Ricoh in 1997. [1] A CD-RW compact disc (CD-RWs) can be written, read, erased, and re-written. CD-RWs, as opposed to CDs, require specialized readers that have sensitive laser optics.
Retail recordable/writable optical media contain dyes in/on the optical media to record data, whereas factory-manufactured optical media use physical "pits" created by plastic molds/casts. As a result, data storage on retail optical media does not have the life-span of factory-manufactured optical media.
Although research into optical data storage has been ongoing for many decades, the first popular system was CD, introduced in 1982, adapted from audio to data storage (the CD-ROM format) with the 1985 Yellow Book, and re-adapted as the first mass market optical storage medium with CD-R and CD-RW in 1988.
Burned CD-Rs suffer from material degradation, just like most writable media. CD-R media have an internal layer of dye used to store data. In a CD-RW disc, the recording layer is made of an alloy of silver and other metals—indium, antimony, and tellurium. [20] In CD-R media, the dye itself can degrade, causing data to become unreadable.
Media technologies vary, for example, M-DISC media uses a rock-like layer to retain data for longer than conventional recordable media. While being read-only compatible with existing DVD and Blu-ray drives, M-DISC media can only be written to using a stronger laser specifically made for this purpose, which is built into fewer optical drive models.
Unlike with CD-RW, there is no need for blanking BD-RE before re-use, but they need to be formatted before first use. Burn programs may detect the unformatted state and automatically format the medium before beginning to write. [29] Write verification is a feature of formatted Blu-ray media, officially called "Defect Management".
As of 2023, Blu-ray is the last major optical format to reach widespread use. The ever-increasing speed of broadband internet has replaced many of its roles as a distribution medium for media and video games, and the rapidly falling prices of Flash memory through the 2010s did the same in its archival role with read-write formats. A number of ...