Difference Between DVD-R and DVD-RW

DVD-R vs DVD-RW

This is the age of heavy media storage, and DVD’s help people to record and download their media files easily. Called Digital Versatile Disc or Digital Video Disc, these DVD discs are available in many formats. Out of these two most popular ones are DVD-R and DVD-RW. Both allow users to record and store media files such as music or movies and run on all devices with DVD drives. The major difference between them lies in the number of times they can be used.

Whereas DVD-R is known as readable DVD, DVD-RW is a rewritable DVD. This means that you can store files only once in a DVD-R and cannot erase and record another file on it, DVD-RW allows the user to erase and record information multiple number of times. Amazingly, the quality of modern DVD-RW is such that one can record and reuse them almost a thousand numbers of times.

It was DVD-R that first appeared in the markets in 1997 and DVD-RW was introduced in 1999. It means that older devices such as DVD players and other DVD drives of that period are incompatible with the new technology that DVD-RW offered. However, all later DVD drives are compatible with both DVD-R and DVD-RW.

While it is true that one can use DVD-RW several times to store information, they are outscored by DVD-R in terms of space available for storage. DVD-R discs are today available in dual layer format which gives one almost double the space of an ordinary single layer DVD-R disc (8.5GB as compared to 4,7GB).

As DVD-RW gives one option of recoding files as many times he likes, they are naturally more expensive than ordinary DVD-R. A spindle of 50 DVD-R costs same as a spindle of 15 DVD-RW which implies that DVD-RW are nearly three times the price of DVD-R.