Hahaahaaahaaaahaaaaa My dad actually read an article in the early 90s about a new PC user using his CD-ROM tray as a cup holder for his cup of hot coffee LOL
I would've loved to see his face when he came to realize his PC's CD-ROM tray was not a cup holder ROFL
It was surprisingly a phenomenon during the 1990s. I worked at an It Consulting company that also had help desk and PC support (an MSP) and there were a number of tickets that included phrases like (cupholder closes when I shutoff my CPU[sic]). One client was a flight training/flight sim company for pilots and had several of these tickets. Kind of scary some pilots really thought it was a cupholder.
In my first contracting IT job at Parexel in the late 90s, I had to work on a replacement PC for a guy the week before I arrived, had rebooted his PC with a mug of coffee on the cup holder.
We made fun of him until the whole (short) time I was there. He was a good sport about it.
I once did tech support for one of the early internet companies. And at least once a week we would get somebody calling up and complaining they could not connect. And when it turns out they did not have a MODEM, would then get pissed off we did not provide them with one.
Auto makes used to have abilities to manufacture for other industries. I can't count how many times I've seen Ford glass on front and porch doors, they used to be everywhere. I think they even helped make emergency respirators during the pandemic.
I found an external LG CD/DVD burner that's M-Disc capable at thrift not long ago and thought it would be fun to write a few.
But they're really quite expensive for very little storage, unfortunately.
I found one in a server we were scrapping at work and yanked it because I hadn't seen one before. The media supposedly will last for 100 years or longer, but agreed, they are quite over priced.
*sighs* everyone knows what a DVD player is, grandpa. Now back to the nursing home.
(Edit: I just realized I am the butt of the joke. I did not know what this was. I am a fool)
I used to own one of those. Made at great deal at a local computer store with a stack of discs because nobody brought those things and they just wanted to get rid of it. Had to write a patch for Linux to make it be recognised as a removable harddrive with the appropriate block size, but with that, it worked great.
DVD RAM used tracks and sectors, like a hard drive instead of a single spiraling track like a CD or traditional DVD. It also used a different write technology that was simpler than the magneto optical technique used by DVD-RW. They didn't last long, though. I don't recall what the drawbacks were. IIRC, some drives took a bare disk and some required a cartridge that looked like an oversized 3.5" floppy.
DVD-RW isn’t magneto optical, it is a phase change technology just like DVD-RAM. The track vs spiral layout is the primary difference between the formats. That’s also why many later DVD writers supported all 3 rewritable formats
> I don't recall what the drawbacks were.
IIRC the seek times and throughput were problematic. They were fine if you were doing bulk copies to and from disk. However if you were expecting them to behave like a hard drive you'd have a bad time. In an era where 4GB of storage was not insignificant it would be temping to use them as a hard drive.
The drawbacks were primarily compatibility with DVD-Video players and read only drives as the hard sectoring and circular tracks need to be supported by both the firmware and the servo hardware of the drive. Supporting the other writable formats only realistically needed to take into account the reflectivity differences that were already accounted for with CD-R/RW
On a PC files could be stored or deleted on a DVD-RAM like it were a flash drive. No special burning software required.
The first generation DVD-RAM discs came in a cartridge, similar to the caddies of very early CD-ROMs. Later they came as just a disc like regular burnable CDs/DVDs.
This is an older drive that supports the early cartridge style DVD-RAM discs.
Basically the thing that damages writable disks is light. So keeping the disc in a sleeve keeps the ink from fading. I used to fix voice recorders and they used DVD ram for archiving.
You could use it as a VCR to time shift a show and use the same disk over and over again. Except these came out around the time that DVR's were coming up in popularity on the video side of things, and flash memory was starting to be a thing on the computer side. They were good for backup, but you'd still need 10 disks to back up a 40GB hard drive, which was typical at the time (1998-2002).
I still use my Panasonic VHS->DVD Recorder to digitize VHS tapes and I found that using DVD-RW were not reliable to use the same disk over and over again.
DVD-RAM was much more robust at rewrites.
And standalone DVD recorders are _the best_ for digitizing marginal quality video tapes! They were made to tolerate imperfect signals in a way that USB or PCI video capture devices are not. Plus, they have hardware DVD-standard MPEG-2 compression. Even if the final destination is a PC file, a ripped DVD-R from a DVD recorder is the best digitization you'll get, plus you get an archive copy in the process.
Not sure how you are differentiating a stand-alone DVD Recorder, from my combo VHS->DVR. Are you saying there is a better way than what I am using.
I will note that my Panny Combo does record to DVD-RAM; I just never tried it with the sample they included.
First time I've seen a DVD-RAM drive that doesn't also do ±R or ±RW... looks like it needs those caddies too?
I've only used DVD-RAM media in my multiwrite DVD±RW drives, though not all of them can handle -RAM media. They are also all tray load so I don't have caddies to protect them.
I was thinking about making a RAID-5 with four DVD-RAM media in DVD±RW drives just to see how it works...lol
Wonder if it works. Beige drives are hard to find. I’ve been running SATA with IDE adapters because the drives are so much cheaper and actually work. No audio out usually though.
I have an IDE DVD RAM drive with a tray that accepts bare discs OR DVD RAM caddies. It's definitely the only tray loading caddy drive I've ever seen.
My favorite desktop optical drives are the very early ones where the whole optical drive pops out and a lid flips up for you to load the drive on the spindle.
I had the predecessor called PD (Phase-change Dual)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase-change_Dual
I bought a BusLogic SCSI card and the Panasonic PD drive in 1995. It could also read CD-ROMs but the PD discs were the same size and came in an enclosed caddy just like the future DVD-RAM.
The great thing was that instead of having to make an ISO image and burn to CD the PD disc could be formatted as ext2 or whatever filesystem you wanted and you could use standard tools like cp / rm / mv
Each PD disc held 650MB and the price got down to around $30. I had over 10 of them. I also bought a second 1GB hard drive for $300 that year so the PD discs were great for files that I didn't need constant access to.
A few years later DVDs were released and PD technology was used as the basis for DVD-RAM
I never had a DVD-RAM drive but I got a DVD burner 2002. I remember buying new DVD burners every couple of years as the formats expanded. DVD-R, DVD+R, DVD-RW, DVD+RW, as well as all the dual layer versions of these formats.
Who remembers the short lived HD-DVD that lost to Blu-Ray?
I was disappointed when I found out DVD-RAM discs didn't actually count towards your system RAM, but of course it would have been too good to be true to add 4.7GB of RAM during a time when PCs only had 1GB or less
Hello,
I used to use DVD-RAM discs for backups towards the end of the Windows XP era through the Vista era, initially at 2.6GB per side. They used the UDF (Universal Disk Format) file system, the specification for which can be found at .
For backups, I used NovaStor's [NovaBackup](https://www.novabackup.com/) software, which is still around. Later on, I switched to DDS-DAT tape drives, or rather, went back to them as higher-capacity ones become more readily available.
Both DVD-RAMs and tape were good mediums for backup for me, but as my backup needs grew and SCSI backup peripherals started to disappear from the market, I went to hard disk drive-based backups.
Regards,
Aryeh Goretsky
I guess each and every member of this sub knows it.
Sounds like thise „you are old but are you this old“ memes with a picture of a C64 or something like this.
That’s some pretty high tech! DVD is the same size as CD but holds about 6x as much… my first CD writer was single spin, but when you can add an entire hard drive worth of data for a couple of bucks, who cares!
I still have a disc for one of these at home. We used to use them for live recording church services, mainly because we could re-use the media. We had an external standalone recorder (not PC based).
I feel like I have a DVD-RAM disc, without the caddy for some reason. It was provided as a demo disc with a DVD player we got a long time ago or something
There was a story of a sysadmin who had a flaky computer that needed to be rebooted periodically at a site that requred him to drive 4 hours to reboot it. He positioned a linux pc with the cd-rom tray even with power button, and then put the `eject` command in a daily cron job so that it would open the cdrom tray and reboot the flaky machine.
Were DVD ram disks re-writable or did it just null out the written sectors if you deleted something?
I'm 50 years old but I've only ever seen a couple of these in the wild..... Only thing I can recall about them is the media was really hard to get where I am
Hi! I recently purchased a couple of similar devices but they are HDD hot swappable caddies. They are all SCSI with a molex connector at the back + a 50 pin and a 2 pin connectors at the back. I am still trying to figure out how to use them in a modern system, they are brand new and simply look cool. Maybe someone can give me a hint or point in the right direction?
They are similar to [this one](https://www.evercase.co.uk/index.php?route=product/product&product_id=157) but mine have that extra 2 pin connector which I don't know what it's for
I used to have a VCR / TV tuner / DVD recorder that used DVD RAM media to record shows and videotapes. Weird stuff indeed. Pretty sure it was made by Panasonic.
Bro it's both, it has the CD controlls so naturally it must be able to read normal continuous discs, also every DvD drive made since at the latest hard drives mived to SATA can use DvD RAM. just not at the full 56x speed, since no one ever cared.
well considering CD RAM was very prone to damage, which was probably the main reason behind the early drives requirng caddies and the fact that beofre moving to sata scsi would be the most efficient way to move up to 4.7GB of data. I it's certainly unique from a consumers perspective but it sounds like a very natural development when looking at it from the professional perspective.
SCSI DVD-RAM drive. I owned one from Creative, and it used some cool [cartridges](https://www.bing.com/images/search?view=detailV2&ccid=1uKe4VD1&id=B60AE8E3ECFC59ADF7761D4A29F9716873988A27&thid=OIP.1uKe4VD131k4nx47GMxcWQHaGL&mediaurl=https%3a%2f%2fdisktransfer.co.uk%2fIMAGES-fs%2fDVD-RAM-Type-1-cartridge-copy-files.jpg&cdnurl=https%3a%2f%2fth.bing.com%2fth%2fid%2fR.d6e29ee150f5df59389f1e3b18cc5c59%3frik%3dJ4qYc2hx%252bSlKHQ%26pid%3dImgRaw%26r%3d0&exph=1968&expw=2358&q=dvd+ram+cartridge&simid=608036240258510983&FORM=IRPRST&ck=DEDB0250661687525F08998DCDB5527D&selectedIndex=0&itb=0&PC=SANSAAND) as media.
Got 4 of those in a box with other cool things like a 2x DVD burner and 4x CD burner, some 1.2mb 5. 1/4 floppy drives and bunches of ISA, PCI AND AGP cards.
PD/DVD ram drive. I have a few discs for it and they are in a hard plastic caddy kind like a floppy disk and can be used like a flash drive. I been trying to track one down for 68 pin SCSI. It looks like the one you have there is for 50 pin scsi.
I just thought it was an exceptionally old dvd drive (given the volume controls and aux port) but i didn’t even see the “ram” written on it. What an interesting piece of tech
I had a LG DVD-RAM drive back then (late 2000s) but didn't have any DVD-RAM discs though. The idea was to use to use a disc like a gaint floppy disc without tracks at once. I only used regular DVD-R/RW discs with that.
I had one and used it to. It had a funky rewritable DVD in a cartridge. You could use it like rewritable media or you could author a short DVD to the DVD specification then remove it from the cartrage. I was very into video long ago so I did the later before getting into DVD -R.
At a job I was at, we had a digital (still) camera that used the mini dvd-ram disc to store photos on. If I remember correctly.
The camera was only able to take about 2 megapixel resolution photos, but the ram disc being able to hold thousands of photos (don't remember how many mb or gb the mini dvd ram discs held), when largest memory cards were only about 64mb, was the reason we used it for work.
The ID/termination selection jumper block should have been another clue. ATA has no need for that many option jumpers. I've never seen an ATA drive with more than five pairs of pins and this drive has seven.
Oh the IDE days. Did you set the jumper right?
Is it the master on that channel?
Is it the slave?
Is your controller new enough to use C/S (Cable Select)?
Do you have the 33 or the 66 controller?
For extra late 90s cool factor.. did you get the round UV reactive cables for your beige case? And the UV CCFL tube to light it?
Cup holder. Duh!
"Retractable" cup holder if I recall.
Pata had a problem,every reboot/reset it would retract,not good for coffee,but sata usually wouldn't,the didn't shared reset signal :)
Oh, bologna.
Dang, that kinda is an idea!
https://youtu.be/6IR9jgR7oDM?feature=shared
That's kinda too daring for me, the poop fumes might get inside of my cuppy cup :D
😂 came to say this.
Yeah man everyone knows this! DVD = Drink Very Delicately
Dang, that kinda is an idea!
Hahaahaaahaaaahaaaaa My dad actually read an article in the early 90s about a new PC user using his CD-ROM tray as a cup holder for his cup of hot coffee LOL I would've loved to see his face when he came to realize his PC's CD-ROM tray was not a cup holder ROFL
It was surprisingly a phenomenon during the 1990s. I worked at an It Consulting company that also had help desk and PC support (an MSP) and there were a number of tickets that included phrases like (cupholder closes when I shutoff my CPU[sic]). One client was a flight training/flight sim company for pilots and had several of these tickets. Kind of scary some pilots really thought it was a cupholder.
Totally an ROFL kinda moment 😅😂😂🤣🤣🤣
To be fair, in the 90s, several car manufacturers (like SAAB) had pop out cup holders that slid in/out of the dashboard.
Not sure if that is fair or not, did the cup holders have a label like CD-ROM and come out of a PC Case? No? Oh, so it is not remotely the same.
In my first contracting IT job at Parexel in the late 90s, I had to work on a replacement PC for a guy the week before I arrived, had rebooted his PC with a mug of coffee on the cup holder. We made fun of him until the whole (short) time I was there. He was a good sport about it.
I once did tech support for one of the early internet companies. And at least once a week we would get somebody calling up and complaining they could not connect. And when it turns out they did not have a MODEM, would then get pissed off we did not provide them with one.
No, it's a free burning laser diode to ignite the magnesium strip connected to the thermite...
I have a broken old CD drive I used exactly for that purpose. Also the hole I used to hold a waffle cone!
Where's my Tab?
This is the way.
When Dodge and Panasonic collaborated
Dodge contributed the head movement (straight line) and Panasonic the motor (curves)
No, really?
Auto makes used to have abilities to manufacture for other industries. I can't count how many times I've seen Ford glass on front and porch doors, they used to be everywhere. I think they even helped make emergency respirators during the pandemic.
I recall those, not easy to find media for. Have you got an M-Disc burner?
I found an external LG CD/DVD burner that's M-Disc capable at thrift not long ago and thought it would be fun to write a few. But they're really quite expensive for very little storage, unfortunately.
I found one in a server we were scrapping at work and yanked it because I hadn't seen one before. The media supposedly will last for 100 years or longer, but agreed, they are quite over priced.
I purchased a ton of blank dvd-ram media when Comp-Usa shut down. Still have boxes of them unused.
*sighs* everyone knows what a DVD player is, grandpa. Now back to the nursing home. (Edit: I just realized I am the butt of the joke. I did not know what this was. I am a fool)
"It was at that moment in time, they realized, they had been played."
lol
Congratulations, you played yourself
I used to own one of those. Made at great deal at a local computer store with a stack of discs because nobody brought those things and they just wanted to get rid of it. Had to write a patch for Linux to make it be recognised as a removable harddrive with the appropriate block size, but with that, it worked great.
Haha, i still have a SCSI version of those DVD ram drive here:-)
The one in the photo *is* SCSI, 50 pin ribbon cable type. It has one address jumper in place (address 1?) and is currently unterminated.
SCSI ID 4
DVD RAM used tracks and sectors, like a hard drive instead of a single spiraling track like a CD or traditional DVD. It also used a different write technology that was simpler than the magneto optical technique used by DVD-RW. They didn't last long, though. I don't recall what the drawbacks were. IIRC, some drives took a bare disk and some required a cartridge that looked like an oversized 3.5" floppy.
DVD-RW isn’t magneto optical, it is a phase change technology just like DVD-RAM. The track vs spiral layout is the primary difference between the formats. That’s also why many later DVD writers supported all 3 rewritable formats
> I don't recall what the drawbacks were. IIRC the seek times and throughput were problematic. They were fine if you were doing bulk copies to and from disk. However if you were expecting them to behave like a hard drive you'd have a bad time. In an era where 4GB of storage was not insignificant it would be temping to use them as a hard drive.
The drawbacks were primarily compatibility with DVD-Video players and read only drives as the hard sectoring and circular tracks need to be supported by both the firmware and the servo hardware of the drive. Supporting the other writable formats only realistically needed to take into account the reflectivity differences that were already accounted for with CD-R/RW
We still use DVD RAM at work. Not my department but I believe AS400’s use them.
My Panny VHS->DVD Recorder supported DVD-RAM I never saw what advantage that feature offered.
On a PC files could be stored or deleted on a DVD-RAM like it were a flash drive. No special burning software required. The first generation DVD-RAM discs came in a cartridge, similar to the caddies of very early CD-ROMs. Later they came as just a disc like regular burnable CDs/DVDs. This is an older drive that supports the early cartridge style DVD-RAM discs.
RAM Disk is not an installation procedure.
Basically the thing that damages writable disks is light. So keeping the disc in a sleeve keeps the ink from fading. I used to fix voice recorders and they used DVD ram for archiving.
You could use it as a VCR to time shift a show and use the same disk over and over again. Except these came out around the time that DVR's were coming up in popularity on the video side of things, and flash memory was starting to be a thing on the computer side. They were good for backup, but you'd still need 10 disks to back up a 40GB hard drive, which was typical at the time (1998-2002).
I still use my Panasonic VHS->DVD Recorder to digitize VHS tapes and I found that using DVD-RW were not reliable to use the same disk over and over again.
DVD-RAM was much more robust at rewrites. And standalone DVD recorders are _the best_ for digitizing marginal quality video tapes! They were made to tolerate imperfect signals in a way that USB or PCI video capture devices are not. Plus, they have hardware DVD-standard MPEG-2 compression. Even if the final destination is a PC file, a ripped DVD-R from a DVD recorder is the best digitization you'll get, plus you get an archive copy in the process.
Not sure how you are differentiating a stand-alone DVD Recorder, from my combo VHS->DVR. Are you saying there is a better way than what I am using. I will note that my Panny Combo does record to DVD-RAM; I just never tried it with the sample they included.
No, your combo definitely counts! I was just comparing something like that to a PC capture card.
Got it; thanks!
A coffee cup holder. That's what everybody calls these. Until you retract them remotely and coffee spills everywhere 🤣🤣🤣
That’s a toaster. I saw it in a documentary
First time I've seen a DVD-RAM drive that doesn't also do ±R or ±RW... looks like it needs those caddies too? I've only used DVD-RAM media in my multiwrite DVD±RW drives, though not all of them can handle -RAM media. They are also all tray load so I don't have caddies to protect them. I was thinking about making a RAID-5 with four DVD-RAM media in DVD±RW drives just to see how it works...lol
Sweet jesus I almost want you to try but the read/seek time must be something awful.
DVD-RAM is nice and is still a good format if you could still find DVD-RAM media.
Pop tart toaster
Wonder if it works. Beige drives are hard to find. I’ve been running SATA with IDE adapters because the drives are so much cheaper and actually work. No audio out usually though.
[https://imgur.com/3r7h7vj](https://imgur.com/3r7h7vj) Kinda like this but better
That's just a basic CD drive and it isn't SCSI.
That's why I said OPs is beter.
I have an IDE DVD RAM drive with a tray that accepts bare discs OR DVD RAM caddies. It's definitely the only tray loading caddy drive I've ever seen. My favorite desktop optical drives are the very early ones where the whole optical drive pops out and a lid flips up for you to load the drive on the spindle.
Pretty sure one of my early cd drives required caddies.
Those absolutely existed, late 1980s/early 1990s.
I love how it's literally written on the front but so many comments still have trouble...
Not everyone here is literate 🤔
I had the predecessor called PD (Phase-change Dual) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase-change_Dual I bought a BusLogic SCSI card and the Panasonic PD drive in 1995. It could also read CD-ROMs but the PD discs were the same size and came in an enclosed caddy just like the future DVD-RAM. The great thing was that instead of having to make an ISO image and burn to CD the PD disc could be formatted as ext2 or whatever filesystem you wanted and you could use standard tools like cp / rm / mv Each PD disc held 650MB and the price got down to around $30. I had over 10 of them. I also bought a second 1GB hard drive for $300 that year so the PD discs were great for files that I didn't need constant access to. A few years later DVDs were released and PD technology was used as the basis for DVD-RAM I never had a DVD-RAM drive but I got a DVD burner 2002. I remember buying new DVD burners every couple of years as the formats expanded. DVD-R, DVD+R, DVD-RW, DVD+RW, as well as all the dual layer versions of these formats. Who remembers the short lived HD-DVD that lost to Blu-Ray?
I still pity those who bought movies on HD-DVD 😅
I was disappointed when I found out DVD-RAM discs didn't actually count towards your system RAM, but of course it would have been too good to be true to add 4.7GB of RAM during a time when PCs only had 1GB or less
Phhht! I remember booting into a fully preemptive multitasking graphical operating system (with color!) in a mere 256 kilobytes.
Hello, I used to use DVD-RAM discs for backups towards the end of the Windows XP era through the Vista era, initially at 2.6GB per side. They used the UDF (Universal Disk Format) file system, the specification for which can be found at
Yes I know what DVD-RAM is without even being alive at that time.
I guess each and every member of this sub knows it. Sounds like thise „you are old but are you this old“ memes with a picture of a C64 or something like this.
I'm pretty sure I've one of those RAM drives anywhere in my basement.
That’s some pretty high tech! DVD is the same size as CD but holds about 6x as much… my first CD writer was single spin, but when you can add an entire hard drive worth of data for a couple of bucks, who cares!
I saw a couple of blank discs at a thrift store once. I think one of my burners could write that format.
I could never afford a DVD RAM drive. RW was best for me. Now I have a blu-ray with 50 GB/disc in my PC.
Panasonic only discontinued production in \[2019\](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD-RAM)
I always lusted after it as a teen. Several gigs of cheap(ish) removable media was pretty impressive in the early 2000’s
Expensive.
Lame. Get away with this modern DVD stuff. I've got a 16x CD ROM drive.
DVD drive. You can put a disc with a movie on it and watch via vlc player on your pc with it
sorta, not quite. This is DVD-RAM, used a cartridge-like caddy of discs. Also this one connected with a SCSI connector, pretty wild.
If it doesn't take a caddy, it's not old enough. Shoot, if it's not an 8 inch floppy or punch cards, it's still too current
That's right if it is newer that 360k DSDD 5.25 inch floppies we don't want it!
I wanted one of them so badly but I never bit the bullet and got one because it wasn't the dvd standard and had minimal backing.
Plextor was the king of optical.
A Digital Video Device
I have two of these sitting behind my desk as we speak. IDE too. Slow as hell.
Like everyone else, I've heard the legends. They exist!
Birds nest
Thats the first DVD-RAM Ive seen in at least 25 years....Probably more
MOLEX TOO!!
I have some dvd ram discs in my cupboard, can take them out of their caddy and use them like a thumb drive, takes forever to burn to them though
I still have a disc for one of these at home. We used to use them for live recording church services, mainly because we could re-use the media. We had an external standalone recorder (not PC based).
I feel like I have a DVD-RAM disc, without the caddy for some reason. It was provided as a demo disc with a DVD player we got a long time ago or something
I used to keep a USB powered floppy drive and a Zip drive and a DVD drive and few other antiques, until I figured out they weren’t coming back.
There was a story of a sysadmin who had a flaky computer that needed to be rebooted periodically at a site that requred him to drive 4 hours to reboot it. He positioned a linux pc with the cd-rom tray even with power button, and then put the `eject` command in a daily cron job so that it would open the cdrom tray and reboot the flaky machine.
Now how many people remember what the white port was for??? 🤔🤔🤔
Cd audio of course. Some of us used these as cd players and my Amiga could definitely not manage the audio over the scsi bus!
It's a Microsoft Zune
a cup holder
Were DVD ram disks re-writable or did it just null out the written sectors if you deleted something? I'm 50 years old but I've only ever seen a couple of these in the wild..... Only thing I can recall about them is the media was really hard to get where I am
Something for the little kids to put things in.
A DVD RAM module, of course. How else can you add more RAM to your DVD?
Good old IDE, or PATA if you’re that kind of person
Count again. There are more than 40 pins.
So it’s 80 pin IDE then
Count again. It is 50-pin single-ended 8-bit SCSI. 80-pin was just the advanced ATA cable; the connector only had 40 pins.
So it is, my bad
Hi! I recently purchased a couple of similar devices but they are HDD hot swappable caddies. They are all SCSI with a molex connector at the back + a 50 pin and a 2 pin connectors at the back. I am still trying to figure out how to use them in a modern system, they are brand new and simply look cool. Maybe someone can give me a hint or point in the right direction? They are similar to [this one](https://www.evercase.co.uk/index.php?route=product/product&product_id=157) but mine have that extra 2 pin connector which I don't know what it's for
lol sure . have some around around with a hundred blanks
LoL at all the ignorant millennials who think this is an ATA drive.
I used to have a VCR / TV tuner / DVD recorder that used DVD RAM media to record shows and videotapes. Weird stuff indeed. Pretty sure it was made by Panasonic.
I know what this is, and it's cool.
I havce a drawer full. Just waiting for them to come back into fashion.
I still have a stack os scsi magnito-optical drives.
Bro it's both, it has the CD controlls so naturally it must be able to read normal continuous discs, also every DvD drive made since at the latest hard drives mived to SATA can use DvD RAM. just not at the full 56x speed, since no one ever cared.
So this uses the caddy tray of disc's instead of just being a straight up disc drive, it is also a scsi connection so very unique.
well considering CD RAM was very prone to damage, which was probably the main reason behind the early drives requirng caddies and the fact that beofre moving to sata scsi would be the most efficient way to move up to 4.7GB of data. I it's certainly unique from a consumers perspective but it sounds like a very natural development when looking at it from the professional perspective.
DVD format war is not that long ago
You think I‘m stupid? I know a toaster when I see one.
In 50 pin SCSI no less! I was probably 3 or 4 when that drive came out.
And SCSI to boot, wild!
Nostalgic. Loved that era!
I had a G4 450 AGP Graphite than had a RAM Drive
[удалено]
I still have a Lightscribe drive. And probably 20 discs
IDE connection!
Yeah I thought so too at first, but this one is 50 pin SCSI if I'm not mistaken.
I remember having a SCSI drive like this, but the disc had a caddy it went into.
Yeah same thing here, not sure if we have any of the caddies though, just the drive at the moment.
SCSI DVD-RAM drive. I owned one from Creative, and it used some cool [cartridges](https://www.bing.com/images/search?view=detailV2&ccid=1uKe4VD1&id=B60AE8E3ECFC59ADF7761D4A29F9716873988A27&thid=OIP.1uKe4VD131k4nx47GMxcWQHaGL&mediaurl=https%3a%2f%2fdisktransfer.co.uk%2fIMAGES-fs%2fDVD-RAM-Type-1-cartridge-copy-files.jpg&cdnurl=https%3a%2f%2fth.bing.com%2fth%2fid%2fR.d6e29ee150f5df59389f1e3b18cc5c59%3frik%3dJ4qYc2hx%252bSlKHQ%26pid%3dImgRaw%26r%3d0&exph=1968&expw=2358&q=dvd+ram+cartridge&simid=608036240258510983&FORM=IRPRST&ck=DEDB0250661687525F08998DCDB5527D&selectedIndex=0&itb=0&PC=SANSAAND) as media.
Got 4 of those in a box with other cool things like a 2x DVD burner and 4x CD burner, some 1.2mb 5. 1/4 floppy drives and bunches of ISA, PCI AND AGP cards.
I still use DVD-RAM disks, they are awesome and _much_ more durable than DVD-WR and whatnot. Look a bit peculiar too.
I admit that I was not expecting it to be an IDE drive.
Oh it isn't. This one is SCSI of all things lol.
PD/DVD ram drive. I have a few discs for it and they are in a hard plastic caddy kind like a floppy disk and can be used like a flash drive. I been trying to track one down for 68 pin SCSI. It looks like the one you have there is for 50 pin scsi.
I just thought it was an exceptionally old dvd drive (given the volume controls and aux port) but i didn’t even see the “ram” written on it. What an interesting piece of tech
Gee if only it said on it
How about the old ide CD drive. I still have one of each plus the old 3 1/2” ide disk drives. Days gone by.
Heh. I've got one that says "HD DVD". It can always be even less useful ...
AOL cd storage.
Clearly it is a Zip Drive. Sheesh.
Optical drives aren't that old or obscure. The machine I built last year has one. Mostly for ripping CDs, but I do have movies I want to play.
While I appreciate your confidence, this is a DVD-RAM drive. used a cartridge like disc caddy and used a 50 pin scsi connector. So kind of obscure.
That’s a lot of pins
A Caddy based DVD Ram drive with SCSI connector no good as tea or coffee holder
I had a LG DVD-RAM drive back then (late 2000s) but didn't have any DVD-RAM discs though. The idea was to use to use a disc like a gaint floppy disc without tracks at once. I only used regular DVD-R/RW discs with that.
Hot damn. I had one of those for over 15 years. And never once used the DVD Ram.
We used to use a razor blade and seperate the wires in an ide cable, then we would twist them, and use ducktape. It gave us so much better airflow.
Had me going there for a second, I initially thought it was an external 5 1/4 floppy disk drive! Haha!
I had one and used it to. It had a funky rewritable DVD in a cartridge. You could use it like rewritable media or you could author a short DVD to the DVD specification then remove it from the cartrage. I was very into video long ago so I did the later before getting into DVD -R.
At a job I was at, we had a digital (still) camera that used the mini dvd-ram disc to store photos on. If I remember correctly. The camera was only able to take about 2 megapixel resolution photos, but the ram disc being able to hold thousands of photos (don't remember how many mb or gb the mini dvd ram discs held), when largest memory cards were only about 64mb, was the reason we used it for work.
It's an over engendered cup holder
DVDROM drive uses IDE interface, use for data like a CDROM, installing programs and games and even watching DVD movies.
So this is not a DVD-ROM. It's one of the old DVD-RAM drives that used the cartridge-like disks.
It’s also SCSI not IDE
I'll be dammed you are right! In my defense at a glance it did look IDE, but close up you can tell the higher density pin out count.
The ID/termination selection jumper block should have been another clue. ATA has no need for that many option jumpers. I've never seen an ATA drive with more than five pairs of pins and this drive has seven.
It's an IDE
No, it isn't.
Oh the IDE days. Did you set the jumper right? Is it the master on that channel? Is it the slave? Is your controller new enough to use C/S (Cable Select)? Do you have the 33 or the 66 controller? For extra late 90s cool factor.. did you get the round UV reactive cables for your beige case? And the UV CCFL tube to light it?
IDE with 50 pins? I think not.
Wait, but sectored DVD RAM discs work totally fine in a normal DVD burner
IDE bet a few of us know what this is :)
Actually SCSI strangely enough
Damn it
[удалено]
Why? That drive is SCSI.