I still own an 8 MB Sony MSA-8A Memory Stick.
I just tried it and it is still working well.
What makes these old flash devices less useful are their capacities. Even back in 1999 when I received it when buying a Sony DSC-F505 camera it was barely usable. The photos the camera produced were on average 400-600 KB in size
so the flash drive would hold maximum 20 photos.
Then when upgrading to a Sony DSC-S75 in 2001 which produced photos sized around 1.2-1.5 MB it was
unusable.

Yeah they aren’t very fast at all! I have a feeling a lot of people remember them a lot better than they really were.

I’m sure if I’d known about them I would have used them as archival only it seems the time saved would be not having to do the session open/close dance.

But formatting does take forever. But we were used to insanely slow stuff back then.

I managed to dig out the only used DVD-RAM disc I had left, and plopped it into my BD-RE drive. It is a Maxell 3X speed disc.

It looks like I last written to it in 2007 and the disc was filled with drivers and software for my Socket 939 Athlon64 PC that ran Windows 98SE. Yes, I was still actively using Windows 98 in 2007…

So far the disc 100% still works, actually slower than I remember. I’m getting about 1MB/s read speeds.

If you still have the disks you ought to dig them up and see how many made it this far! It’s be interesting to have a wider sample!

I’ve had excellent luck with DVD-RAM. It was great when usb sticks were still relatively small and expensive. DVD-RAM drives were slow, I remember getting about 4x speed with frequent seeking interrupting file transfers.

Unfortunately when buying used old drives and media, there is no way of knowing the amount of abuse inflicted on them.

Any filesystem other than UDF, was always considered a bad idea. Most filesystems intended for hard disk usage tended to overwrite the same sectors repeatedly.

pretty sure it’ll be fine but check. I bought a cisco 32mb card for my SinclairQL, and the IOS was on there just fine, but it was some random 12.0 for the 7200 I wasn’t interested in… But it was fine.

it certainly feels more geared to small on the fly updates, like transaction logs. It certainly is faster than opening/closing sessions.

I have to really wonder about the longevity of the media & lasers. The disc that does work has a marker date from 2005 so its approaching the end of 25 year expected life, which maybe is the other scary thing, 1998 doesn’t seem that long ago.

Oh these were Panasonic discs. 3x speed so they are not all low quality.

From what I understand the DVD-RAM discs were pushed as being far superior to cheap CD-R media. But with a 50% failure rate I wouldn’t trust this format at all.