NEC-ND 4551A... dvd-ram disks

[vcd_pat]

Hi, hope this is the correct area of the forum for my query, if it's wrong could it please be moved to the appropriate area....

I have the NEC-ND-4551A multi-writer.
I've recently purchased a Panasonic 9.4GB DVD-RAM disk to use in it. Although I have formatted the disk in Windows XP, I read somewhere that the disk could be formatted in a different way (UDF 2.0??) so that I could drag and drop files in Windows Explorer and they would write to the disk much faster.

I have searched Google and cannot really find any suitable software to format the disk in a different way to the standard Windows format. Nero's InCD was mentioned but I don't know if this is only for CD/DVD-RW's.... Surely there must be software out there... this is purely for my own use and I do not intend on writing data to the disk for use on others PC's.

If somebody could please help me I would appreciate it. Thx.

[scarecrow]

You don't need anything at all, unless you still use Windows 9X. DVD-RAM writing is supported natively in Win 200/XP, Linux, MACOSX as if the disk was a harddrive.

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

[zver]

regarding wikipedia i just tryed and sucsefully edited article about incd-is that mean that everybody can edit everything??

[LTR12101B]

Yeah - just look at the amount of vandalism that has to be reverted! - history of most articles is scattered with it, while some get a lot more.

[dx]

I answered this very question (your question) on another forum vcd_pat.

With WinXP SP2 you can natively read/write FAT32 formatted DVD-RAM and can read UDF formatted DVD-RAM. If you want to format and or write UDF, you will need an extra software. You were probably given a disk with such software, but some of them are really crappy (like DirectCD and InCD).

I use the drivers found here... http://panasonic.co.jp/psec/support/...oem/***********

They are the latest Matsu****a/Panasonic drivers that allow you to format UDF 2.0, UDF 1.5, and FAT32. They work flawlessly on my NEC ND 4550... not a single problem to date. Personally, I have found UDF 2.0 to be faster than FAT32, especially on larger file sizes. UDF is DVDs native format anyways.

They should work on any DVD-RAM drive. Problem is, these OEM installers look for Panasonic drives before installing. Panasonic expects NEC, etc. to pay extra for this software and then modify the driver to the consumer.

Fear not... here is the same driver that's been hacked so that it won't look for a Panasonic drive before installing.

h**p://rapidshare.de/files/15256043/Hacked_XPDrv5021.rar.html

These are the XP drivers dated 9/9/2005. If you want any other O.S. driver from that page, let me know and I will show you how to hack them (just requires a little DOS).

This will install 2 processes that must run in background on startup. But they only take 3.4mb combined, so it's not bad at all.