A Solution for us data hogs? It's still early, but it works...and saves you about $225.

As a photojournalist who has made the jump to digital (not all the time, but as much as I can) it is not uncommon for me to come back with 700-800 Mgs of data from a day's shoot, so in the last several months that I have had my Kodak DCS 520, I have been searching for a solution to my impending data crisis as I burned tons of CD-ROM disks and hated CD-R's non-drag and drop capabilities (even though Toast is a wonderful program, and CDDirect works better now,it still is not as easy).

Overview on DVD-RAM...see the details below-

DVD-RAM is still in it's infancy and is not the zippiest drive around, but I have several Gigs of data laying around on my desk and a few disks that I ca throw in a safety deposit box tomake sure that my data (and that means my life's work) won't be lost in some fire or horrific Hard Disk crash. The software to format is still a little rough around the edges, but it's easy and it's a lot less expensive than other formats! I'll take it for now!!!Warning!

My hidden agenda...

My other reason for wanting a better digital storage solution comes from a session at Visual Edge listening to newspaper archive managers discussing how their papers store all the digital images we are creating now. TO MY HORROR, I heard them talking calmly about throwing away all those files that didn't get published in the paper! MY GOD! So history is being erased just because we have no easy way to save it! Okay, maybe I over dramatize, but as I see my negatives from the Persian Gulf war start to fade already, and having risked my life, literally, to make those photos of a historic event, I don't want to see my images, and my fellow photojournalists images, be dumped because we were to lazy or to stupid to not save them (because "it's just to time intensive..."). I hope that long after I am gone, my cataloged work will serve as a record of my time and place on this earth. We have a way to preserve our history in a more efficient way than we ever have in history, so why are we throwing it away! So let's use it and save history! Okay, off my soap box.

Getting all the right stuff...

A hint on one of the Mac web sites about software for DVD-RAM drives lead me to Software Architect's (http://www.softarch.com/) that distributes DVD-RAM Tune-up for the Mac platform (which is the same program offered with LaCie's drive). Although their software is fairly well known for Hard Drives (Formatter 5) and CD-Rom's, etc., I couldn't find any stores like Mac Zones or MacConnection that carried the DVD-RAM Tune-up, so I called creative directly in their sales department and they took my order over the phone and shipped directly to me. DVD-RAM Tune-up claims to get better cache performance and other tools. They will probably ship you Version 1.0, but you will need to follow-up with tech support and have them e-mail the update to Version 1.0.4. (maybe we should ask them to post updates on their updates page). They are also preparing Version 2.0 that will have full support of the UDF file format! (Price was something like $59)

Formatting: You have a choice or HFS or HFS+ with 2.6 gigs on each side   Once formatted, I had no problems with any disk mounting and working easily. Drag and Drop ease of use is Great! Copies from Hard Drives, Jaz Drive all went fine...

But some CD-Rom Copy conflicts:

Since I am using a SuperMac, (running OS 8.5, Speed Doubler, Iomega ext, etc and two what is, in essence two CD-Drives) I have replaced original Matshita CD-Rom with a Cyberdrive 24x recently. Since it is not directly supported by Apples new DVD/CDRom, I had a few glitches on some copies of large files from the Cyberdrive (using FWB's CDT) but I assume it's the cache from CDT.

Write Speed

Without DVD-RAM Tune-up transfer speed starts out around 750KB/sec but falls to around 360KB/sec after the first 20 Megs. Not exactly the speediest set-up around, but still economical and easier to use than burning CD-ROMs

With the most recent Speed Doubler 8.1.2, write speed seem to slow down to 100KB per second. So Speed Doubler doesn;t seem to help too much.

Some info on playing DVD-ROM videos on DVD-RAM via John Wolf:

Here is how to get the Mac to read region encoded DVD-Video discs:

* First, you need to temporarily install the DVD-RAM drive into a PC. I would strongly suggest using the included Adaptec PCI SCSI card, using other SCSI cards, I was unable to make this work. \

* Get the file UREGSET.EXE, part of the DVDEW9X.EXE download on Creative Labs web site. You don't need to install the Encore DVD package to use this application. Just extract UREGSET out of the DVDEW9X.EXE archive.

* Run the UREGSET app and set the region code to whatever region you want.

* Shut down the PC and remove the DVD-RAM drive and plug it back into the Mac. If you don't already have it, install the Apple CD/DVD 1.1 driver from the Elecede CoolDVD 1.6 package. You should be set.Now, to prevent confusion, this is really only of concern to people who already have MPEG 2 decoder cards like the CoolDVD card. Also, the Apple
CD/DVD 1.1 driver doesn't get along with the Software Architects DVD-RAM Tuneup extension. You don't want both enabled at the same time. Not really a big deal for me, I use the DVD-Rewrite portion only to back up occasionally. Most of the time, the Apple driver is adequate. It is just a matter of creating an extensions manager set to switch back and forth between drivers.

Useful Links:

DVDEW9X.EXE archive that contains the UREGSET application:
http://www.soundblaster.com/asp-scripts/download.asp?file=/creative/drivers/
cdrom/dvdew9x.exe&Agrmt=slicense.html

CoolDVD 1.6 archive that contains the Apple CD/DVD 1.1 driver:
http://www.e4.com/drivers.htm
For those who don't have an MPEG 2 decoder card yet, take a look at:
http://www.epita.fr/~aloe_f/Soft_DVD/Soft_DVD.html

A few recent reviews of DVD-RAM

DVD-RAM Drive Review

DVD-RAM REview of Panasonic/Matsushita Drive

A Site dedicated to DVD-RAM drives you might want to check out....

DVD-DATA Site and mail list created by Steve Rothman

I will try and post any updates on resolving these conflicts in the near future...

Disclaimers:

P.S. I have no interests in Creative Solutions, FWB, SuperMac, etc...Just FYI for people like myself...

Stay tuned...I will try and give a progress report on my efforts to get my new ADSL connection up and running on my Mac (even though my local phone company provider only supports Windoze)...I'll try and share some of the pros/cons of that set-up....