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YSDDT 0.1.2 (DOS Toolkit for Working with Disks & Partitions) (Announce)

posted by bretjohn Homepage E-mail, Rio Rancho, NM, 09.10.2025, 22:49

> BTW did you investigated USB XHCI/OHCI to add support for a bit newer MBs
> to your USB drivers?
I'm working on EHCI, but progress is VERY slow (very little time to work on these kinds of things any more).


> I also used DVD-RAMs media in the past but some years ago I found they
> turned bad way - I still can read them but writting went extremelly slow
> and usually fails then.
I'm not surprised at that. Although DVD-RAMs are writable, they have a limited number of times they can be written to. It's way more that something like a CD-RW, but nothing like a real hard drive. The problem is that every time you need to write something (even just to change the time stamp or change a file attribute) you write to the FAT area of the disk, so even though the data from the file itself may get stored in a new place the metadata doesn't move. In addition, the same sector of the disk will store the metadata for several files, so changing one file indirectly affects several other files at the same time. So a DVD-RAM would probably be OK for something like a backup (especially if you transferred it as an "image" and use Disk-At-Once instead of copying one file at a time), but you probably wouldn't actually want to treat it like a big floppy (though floppies aren't all that reliable either). The "image" backup idea is also what I'm thinking might be feasible for something like FAT32 formatted writable optical media.

>...
>
> One viable option for longterm backups could be M-Disc archival BR medias
> (25/50/100GB) that are still offered. But I see that choice of internal BR
> writer drives shrinked to just one Asus model - probably rebranded LG. Seems
> optical medias are dead...
They certainly seem to be dying, though not quite dead yet (just like DOS itself). I think your options for USB external drives will be more viable than internal optical drives. I know my USB optical drive is pretty old so I'm not even sure it supports M-discs -- I haven't used it in awhile. I know it's really hard to find new laptops with any kind of internal optical drive any more (and of course they don't have a BIOS, either).

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