> it's the dog's danglies !

Ah, the good old dog's wassnames. Wouldn't want to be
dangling too much out in your weather though

> You can treat it just like a hard drive, deleting individual recordings
> (or even parts of them) and the space becomes available immediately

The 100,000 re-writable appeals to me over CDs. Even if CDs can
be had for 30c. It's like a super-Zip
 
> The downside is that you can't give your friends a DVD-RAM
> disk and expect them to be able to play it on their ordinary DVD
> players

No problem there - I have no friends. A Post-It is quite adequate
for those "I know where you live" messages

> As for using them on a PC, most DVD drives don't handle
> DVD-RAM, so you will very likely have to buy a new one

I have the LG GSA-4176B

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/storage/display/lg-gsa-4167b.html

So far I'm well happy with it, and the review above has been
very helpful. It certainly out-performs my ASUS CRW-4824A,
which keeps mislaying its damn driver, wretched thing. I tend not
to run writes flat out, often 24X or 36X is quite fast enough on
most reasonable quality disks. Probably works well enough at
48X

Where a DVD-RAM would be useful is keeping large files (like
audio to be edited) off the HDD in one piece. I tend to be quite
frugal with HDDs but it can get tricky with a large audio or video
file taking up space that you need for another. So it means you have
to attended to the editing to clear some space right now now

> Oh, another thing:  9.4GB is a double-sided disk, and I haven't
> seen a drive that can cope with both sides without manually ejecting
> and flipping it

I "think" the LG can do both sides - someone suggested that's
what the "dual layer" is all about

Articles like this are helpful too, still exploring DVDs

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD-RAM

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