Using a DVD-RW as a system drive?

[LeBulle]

I just had a strange dream. I dreamt that my computer had like ten DVD burners and I ran all of them with DVD-RW in some sort of a RAID configuration. I used that as my main system disk, ran Windows and games from it. Strange. Is that even possible?

[Trinopoty]

I'm leaning towards no. Linux can boot from an optical media but I don't think a fully functioning Windows can boot from optical.

Also, a DVD-RW fills up the more you write to it. A DVD-RAM would probably be best for this.

[SupaKomputa]

Writing on a RW is very slow, only 1.5 MB/s, compare to a regular HDD which is around 150-250 MB/s or 100 times faster, or with ssd which can give you up to 3000 MB/s.

Even with 10 drives, your theoritical IO still below any old school class 10 USB2 flash drive.

[Sauron]

1 hour ago, SupaKomputa said:

Writing on a RW is very slow, only 1.5 MB/s, compare to a regular HDD which is around 150-250 MB/s or 100 times faster, or with ssd which can give you up to 3000 MB/s.

Even with 10 drives, your theoritical IO still below any old school class 10 USB2 flash drive.

Also I could be wrong but iirc you can only write the whole disc from the start - meaning you'd somehow have to keep the system running while it burns a full copy of itself on the disc.

[Chiyawa]

Strange dream, but it is achievable, just not really practical.

 

The major downside of using this method is the writing of data. If the disc is full, the drive would have to erase the area that needs to be written before it can write the data. This, coupled with slow speed of the DVD drive (because all disc couldn't spin that fast) means your system would be slow to a crawl when writing data.

 

Also, discs prone to scratches if not properly handle, and result in errors.