I bought an LG 4160 because of reviews here and the fact that it burns DVD-RAM. My experience with Ricoh, Plextor and Lite-On burners and CD-RW media lead me to expect that data integrity would decrease with multiple rewritings with DVD-RW, so the best rewritable solution seemed to DVD-RAM. I was unaware, however, that RAM disks have a reduced capacity compared to +-R disks. While write once disks have a capacity of 4.37GB, my Panasonic RAM disks can only hold 4.27GB. Since it was my intention to back up movies temporarily, this reduced capacity has made it impossible to do complete backups. Overburning by even 10MB seems to be impossible as I get a failure warning by Nero every time. Was anyone else aware of DVD-RAM's reduced capacity and is there any way to format it so that it regains the lost 100MB?

Here's my partial solution for others who may be tempted to use RAM disks for a similar purpose. I've found that even when the burn process results in failure due to overburning, the disk will still play in my Panasonic DVD player up until the spot that created the error. This usually means that the disk stops playing at some point during the end credits, something that I don't really care about most of the time.

Other solutions, of course, require stripping parts of the DVD like foreign language audio or previews.

But it was a real shock to find that my 4.7GB DVD-RAM disks don't have as much capacity as my 4.7GB -R disks.

Lastly, I've rewritten to one RAM disk multiple times and data integrity appears to be good all the way to the end of the disk. That is something one would expect from a medium meant for archival backup.

Maybe file system takes it's toll?

BTW... excuse me, but what has Nero got to do with DVD-RAM disks?
I'm using daily DVD-RAM with my LG GSA-4040B. Explorer (or any other file manager) is enough for me - No need for Nero.

(in reply to XandO)

So, are you seeing the same reduced capacity that I am?

As for Nero, it's what I like. It doesn't require a RAM driver. And it allows me to get most of the movie onto the disk whereas I could not burn a partial file that was too large to fit entirely on the disk using file drag and drop.

(in reply to Cooler)

About same capacity, yes. Could be a bit different, depending file system used.
I do use Nero for CD/DVD burns, but I'm more comfortable without burning software when DVD-RAM is used. But I can't blame you for liking nero...

(in reply to XandO)