On 2026-03-29 Adam Thompson wrote:
Not being about to do that in the first place was why tools like cdrecord, cdrdao, wodim, et al. came into existence. -Adam
Ya, I think Adam's right. I'm probably the guy who burns the most optical in the club -- just passed my 2000th backup disc, and do maybe 125-150 a year. I've never seen dd just work for this. cdrecord does a bucketload of stuff before/during burning, as you'll see if you use the -v option. For write-once -R media the magic is: cdrecord -v dev=/dev/sr0 speed=16 -dao my.iso To be extra careful, you can lower the speed to 8 or 4. Going slower is sometimes *less* reliable with modern drives though. I find about 1 in 40 discs is a dud: often due to visible flaw/damage, but sometimes just for no reason at all. I also find drives will sometimes go nutso after 50-80 straight burns and will burn 100% coasters until an actual full computer reset. And eventually they just die for writing... For +R media you have to use the growisofs, and for -RW media you need to use cdrecord to format it first. I use -R 99% of the time. I don't think the market is dying just yet as right now the comp wholesalers still have like 10 brands to choose from. Clearly there are still uses for it. As for USB replacing it: not if cost is a factor. I still have optical at ~4c a GB. AI says the cheapest USB sticks will be around 20c a GB, or 5X more. It is getting closer, though! And being able to re-use 5-10 years later has some appeal... unless the flash is all dead for writing after 10 years? Not as easy to put 50 of them on a spindle for storage, though! :-) And DVD-DL: yes, appears to be gone :-( I bought a tiny amount of media thinking I'd get a drive when the prices dropped, and instead the drives just disappeared. BluRay writable appears to have killed it, and those are still an option, though getting a non-USB drive may be tricky. If anyone has a drive that can burn DL I'll sell you some media cheap! Or trade for -R's I can actually use. Cool, there appears to be a 100GB/disc format now -- but $/GB is worse than USB.