How many burns can a DVD-RW do?

reb00tin

Gawd
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Apr 13, 2009
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How many times can you burn safely? I have some that I've been using for years, I keep wondering how long they will last and if they're still reliable. Is there a utility that can tell how many burns a DVD-RW has done?
 
I've burn like 300+ disks without any issue at all, its a LG GSA-H44N unit, cheap, simple and problem free, and I use LG units on all the computers i build.
 
Well, I can't speak for every drive, but we had some disk duplicators with 2-3 year old DVDRW drives that kicked out a couple of thousand burned copies before failure. The laser diodes have only gotten better with time, I would honestly expect the physical mechanism (trays, gears etc) to wear out before the laser did. That said, I have also had drives die after 10 burns. Unfortunately, it is the luck of the draw when it comes to that. In the end, you can get a new 22x DVDRW for $18 delivered from Newegg, As to the number of burns to be read by a utility, usually the drives keeps records in minutes/hours and not number of disks internally (I only know this because I know someone who used to write firmware for optical drives) but I don't know of any publicly available utility which will give you the info and it is not a standard location manufacturer to manufacturer.
 
No, I meant what is the useful life of the re-writable disk? How many times can you burn before it's finished?
 
No, I meant what is the useful life of the re-writable disk? How many times can you burn before it's finished?

Well I know I have some cd-rw's that went bad after about 15ish burns. I don't know how different that would be for dvd-rw disks.
 
I can't say I have burned any single DVDRW more than 5 times. If you want better results I would suggest using better media. Taiyo Yuden is usually my first suggestion for media in general, but I haven't seen any DVDRW (- or +) from them. In that case, the Verbatim Datalife+ seems to be the best regarded from what I have read. Media in general has gotten so cheap I usually just use a DVDR instead of using/erasing/using a RW.
 
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